The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-CureDewey, Edward Hooker
Science
The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure
Dewey, Edward Hooker
Fasting; Nutrition
This no-breakfast plan was so contagious that I was not long in finding
that farmers in all directions were beginning to go to their labors with
much less food in their stomachs than had been their wont, and in all
cases with added power of muscle.
Only recently three farmers went into the field one hot morning to
cradle oats, the most trying of all work on the farm; two of them had
their stomachs well filled with hearty foods. With profuse sweating and
water by the quart because of the chemical heat arising from both
digestion and decomposition, these toiled through the long hours with
much weariness. The third man had all his strength for the swinging of
the cradle, the empty stomach not even calling for water; with the
greatest ease he kept his laboring friends in close company and when the
noon hour came he was not nearly so tired as they.
A man who had been a great sufferer from indigestion, a farmer, found
such an increase of health and strength from omitting the morning meal
that he became able to cradle rye, a much heavier grain than oats,
during an entire forenoon "on an empty stomach." Later he went from one
December to the following April on one daily meal, and not only with
ease, but with a gain in weight in addition. During these months this
man did all the work usual in farm-houses, besides riding several hours
over a milk route during the forenoons.
In this city resides a carpenter, formerly subject to frequent
sicknesses, who for the past five years has walked nearly a mile to the
shop where he is employed without even as much as a drink of water for
breakfast; and this not only without any sicknesses, but with an
increase in weight of fifteen pounds also.
More than a dozen years ago a farmer who was not diseased in any way,
but who had been in the habit of eating three times a day at a
well-spread table, and at mid-forenoon taking a small luncheon for
hunger-faintness, omitted his breakfast and morning luncheon, and has
been richly rewarded since then in escaping severe colds and other
ailings. He conclusively felt that his forenoon was the better half of
the day for clear-headedness and hard labor; he has added nearly a score
of pounds to his weight, and his case has been a wonder to all his
farmer friends, who see only starvation in cutting down brain and
needless stomach taxing.
I must now ask the reader to bear with me while I apply the principles
of this new hygiene with a good deal of reiteration, trying to vary them
in utterance as far as possible. The need of daily food is primarily a
matter of waste and supply, the waste always depending upon the amount
of loss through the general activities, manual labor being the most
destructive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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