Figuratively, I was swept off my feet when a noble example of Southern womanhood put before my famished eyes the following items, to wit: About half a bushel of newly picked turnip greens, rearing islandwise above a sloshing sea of pot licker and supporting upon their fronded crests the boiled but impressive countenance of a hickory-cured shote, the whole being garnished with paired-off poached eggs like the topaz eyes of beauteous blond virgins turned soulfully heavenward; and set off by flankings of small piping-hot corn pones made with meal and water and salt and shortening, as Providence intended a proper corn
pone should be made.
Then the years rolled away like a scroll and once again was I back in the Kentucky foothills, a lean and lathy sprout of a kid, a limber six-foot length of perpendicular appetite; and it was twelve o'clock for some people, but it was dinner time for me!
My glad low gurgle of anticipatory joy smothered the small inner voice of caution as I leaped, as it were, headlong into that bosky dell of young turnip greens. So, having set my feet on the downward path I backslode some morefor behold, what should come along then but an old-fashioned shortcake, fashioned of crisp biscuit dough, with more fresh strawberries bedded down between its multiplied and mounting layers than you could buy at the Fritz-Charlton for a hundred and ninety dollars.
Right then and there was when and where I lost all I had gained in a fortnight of stalwart self-disciplining; rather it was where I regained all I haply had lost. When, gorged and comatose, I staggered from that fair matron's depleted table I should never have dared to trundle over a wooden culvert at faster than four miles an hour. Either I should have slowed down or waited until they could put in some re-enforced-concrete underpinnings.
I was right back where I had started, and for the moment didn't care a darn either. Sin is glorious when you sin gloriously.
But I rallied. I retrieved myself. However, I do not take all the credit to myself for this; circumstances favored me. Shortly I quitted the land of temptation where I had been born, and was back again up North living on dining cars and in hotels, with nothing more seductive to resist than processed pastry and machine-made shortcakes and Thousand Islands dressing; which made the fight all the easier to win, especially as regards the last named. I sometimes wonder why, with a thousand islands to choose from, the official salad mixer of the average hotel always picks the wrong one.
I kept on. The thing proved magically easy of accomplishment. By the fit of my clothing, if by nothing else, I could have told that several of my more noticeable convexes were becoming plane surfaces and gave promise in due season of becoming almost concave, some of 'em. But there was other and convincing testimony besides. I could tell it by my physical feelings, by my viewpoint, by my enhanced zest for work and for play.
Purposely, for the first month I refrained from weighing myself. When I did begin weighing at regular intervals I found I was losing at a rate of between two and three pounds a week. Moreover, I had now proved to my own satisfaction that within sane reasonable limitations I could resume eating most of the things which formerly I ate to excess and which I had altogether eliminated from my menus during the initiatory stages of dieting.
About the time I emerged from the novitiate class I discerned yet one more gratifying fact. If I were in the woods, camping and fishing, or hunting or tramping or riding or taking any fairly arduous form of exercise, I could eat pretty much anything and everything, no matter how fattening it might be. Work in the open air whetted my appetite, but the added exertion burned up the waste matter so that the surplus went into bodily strength instead of into fatty layers. Consumption was larger, but assimilation was perfect.
For my daily life at home, where I am writing this, I have cut out these things: All the cereals; nearly all the white bread; all the hot bread; practically all pastries except very light pastries; white potatoes absolutely; rice to a large extent; sausages and fresh pork and nearly all the ham; cream in my coffee and on fruits; and a few of the starchier vegetables.
Of butter and of cheese and of nuts I eat perhaps one-third the amount I used to eat, and of meats, roughly, one-half as much as before the dawn of reason came. Of everything except the items I just have enumerated I eat as freely as I please. And when a person begins to reckon up everything else among the ediblesflesh, fowl, fish, berries, fruits, vegetables and the rest he finds quite a sizable list.
I shall not pretend that I do not pine often for sundry tabooed things. Take pies, nowif there is any person alive who likes his pie better than I do he's the king of the pie likers, that's all. And I am desolated at being compelled to bar out the ricenot the gummy, glued-together, sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and butter, or with salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.