How to Eat by Thomas Clark Hinkle (good romance books to read txt) 📕

I look back on most of the nights of my childhood with horror, for until I became a man I talked in my sleep and had the most horrible dreams. I used also to get up in my sleep and walk about the room. My parents were well aware of the fact that all of their eight children were poor sleepers, and of them all I was by far the worst. And, although it was innocently done, the food they were giving us was poisoning us. You don't need to think that in order to take poison you must have strychnine or arsenic. No, indeed you don't. We were fed exactly as hundreds and thousands of poor little ones are being fed now as this is being written. We were fed on meat, eggs, and fats, and when we became ill, friends round about us thought they were doing something real kind when they sent in a nice piece of fried rabbit or some celebrated golden brown fried chicken. But we vomited at the sight of the food—which was really our salvation.

I have two boys of my own. The elder, a sturdy chap not yet ten years of age, has to have clothes for a fourteen-year-old boy, and he is much stronger than any boy of his age he has ever met. The younger boy is now seven and his physical development is wonderful for a child of that age. Now these boys hardly know what an egg is. They never eat one. As to meat, I am certain that since they were born they have not eaten it on an average of once a week. They have eaten a little, but you will admit that eating meat not more than once a week, and often going weeks without a bit of it, certainly is eating very little. There have been times when they have not seen meat for three months.

Now, I don't eat as I do and have my children eat as they do just for a fad. I think nothing is more stupid and silly than for people to do certain things just because somebody else does them. We should all have good sound reasons for our actions in this world. We should all try our very best to use sound common sense. That's why I say that people who are the offspring of nervous parents should not eat animal food of any kind after they are twenty-one, and they should never at any time eat eggs. It would be far better for them if they did not eat commercial sugar. But I do admit that when some of these people get well by dieting, they are able to eat sparingly of all these things and still keep well. But some people can never eat them and I am one of the number.

I remember one summer about two years ago I was on a lecture tour for a Chautauqua Bureau, and it seemed that surely I got into the very worst eating places that summer that I ever had in my life. For three or four days I ate only eggs, as they seemed to be about the only food I could get besides bread and butter. At the end of the third day—I remember the time very well—when night came I could not sleep, and just as when I had one of my nervous breakdowns, that old feeling of inexpressible gloom began to settle over me. I knew instantly the cause of it, because twice before when I had purposely experimented with eating eggs I had had similar experiences. I immediately took a heavy cathartic and after having thoroughly rid myself of the poison I again slept well.

But I am not alone in this fight against the use of eggs for nervous people. John Burroughs said that eggs poisoned him, and I have talked with men of great wealth and great business ability who have reached the top by their own efforts, who have told me that eggs poisoned them.

Now I have found that for these nervous people animal food is a slow poison. Sooner or later it will do its work.

And just here I wish to say that there are some people who seemingly can eat almost anything and not suffer from so doing. Last summer I talked with Count Ilya Tolstoy, son of Leo Tolstoy, the celebrated Russian writer. The Count, who is also a lecturer, told me that he was obliged to have eggs and that he had eaten them all his life. He said his appetite was never satisfied unless he ate eggs. He is now past sixty, and apparently is strong and rugged. Now eggs no doubt are good for him. But right here is where infinite harm can be done to nervous people like myself. People who can eat everything—and among physicians seemingly there are many who can do so—will say to these poor sufferers:

"Why, it's all nonsense about things hurting you! Eat anything you want and all you want and then forget about it."

Physicians have said that to me and during the past twenty years I have heard them say it thousands of times to others.

Personally I do not believe in Christian Science—physicians of the Regular school do not believe in it; but do you know that when a physician says to a sufferer from "nerves," "It's all nonsense about what you eat hurting you; eat anything you want and then forget about it," that physician is fully endorsing Christian Science. He is telling the person to whom he is talking that there is no such thing as physical suffering. Of course, such a physician is nothing but a fool. Yet that's why so many of these people turn to Christian Science. Yes, that is exactly why they try it. It bolsters up a sufferer for a time just as contact with a magnetic and hopeful personality may for a time bolster one up. But such persons almost always go back to the sanitariums. "Nerves" is not a mental disease; that is, the seat of the trouble is not mental but physical, and the mental phase of "nerves" is only a symptom, or rather one of the symptoms of the disease.

We people who have gone down into the dark valley have experienced a million, more or less, different kinds of feelings. I fully believe one half of the American people are the offspring of nervous parents. This means that there are fifty-five million of this nervous type of Americans. This type includes people all the way from the man in an office who gets angry quickly, to the individual who is in a state of complete collapse. And the man who is afflicted with nothing more than a quick temper, or is living under high nervous tension, is liable to beget children who will suffer from the malady in a far worse degree than ever he will, unless, indeed, he eats only the things he should eat and observes a number of other rules besides the two I have already laid down.

Now, the ideal diet for nervous people is a slightly modified vegetarian diet. To be specific, it is a Lacto-vegetarian diet minus eggs. There are, however, two things included in this diet that I would warn one in the beginning to eat of sparingly. These are bananas and cooked cabbage. If they agree with you, well and good; but if they do not, let them strictly alone.

Eat all kinds of vegetables, both fresh and cooked. Eat all kinds of fruits, especially fresh fruits. There is an old saying and a good one, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

There are a thousand ways to prepare vegetables and fruits for the table, and there are a number of books that give good recipes. If a nervous individual has never yet had a breakdown I believe he can safely eat most of the vegetarian dishes that have eggs in them, but it would be a serious mistake to select the special dishes that contain eggs and live on those just because they contain eggs.

I believe, too, that after a nervous person is restored to health, if he strictly observes the rules of eating sparingly and of chewing all food to a cream, he may safely try out such courses as are found in Bardsley's Recipes for Food Reformers or Broadbent's Forty Vegetarian Dinners.

It may seem odd, but there are people who for some reason or other lack the instinct, or whatever is needed, to know that a certain thing they eat hurts them. I have had men and women sit in my office and say with the utmost sincerity that they were certain that it wasn't anything they ate that hurt them because they never had any pain in the abdomen. Sometimes these people were in a dreadful state of nervous breakdown. So you see the danger that lies here. If you know, you can always tell what special thing disagrees with you. For example, I know eggs disagree with me, and like John Burroughs and many others, I know when they harm me. Therefore, after you have recovered you might try being your own physician. But if you are not sure as to what disagrees with you, you would much better stick to a vegetarian diet and go without eggs the remainder of your days.

Commercial sugar also is the cause of many breakdowns among the people of this country. And is it not strange how these poor suffering people crave sweets—the very thing they should not have. They will argue with themselves—and some physicians will agree with them—that they should go right on eating candy because they want it. But, as I have already said, there is just as much sense in saying a man should have whiskey because he craves it or that a young man should have tobacco because he craves it, as to say that any one should have candy because he craves it. There is absolutely no sense in such an argument. If you are suffering from a nervous breakdown, for sixty days quit eating candy and everything sweet except honey, and follow the other rules I have already laid down. It may be that you will have to stick to this diet for three months. But try it. That is exactly what cured all my bodily ills and brought my soul out of the dark and gloomy night after everything else had failed. I do not mean to say that this diet alone cured me, but I do say it was the biggest factor in the cure. There are, however, some other things that it would be worse than folly to ignore. This I shall come to later. But just here I want to have it understood that this thing of eating—how you eat, and how much you eat, and what you eat—is of transcendent importance in the cure.

Of course, under some circumstances connected with cases of breakdown, nothing but the good judgment of friends will avail. For example, the question of how much one shall eat is something that not all the books in the world nor all the physicians in the world can determine. I say, always quit while you want a little more. I cannot say more or less than that.

So many have written me recently asking just what I eat, that it may be a help to some of them if I set down here just what I ate today. I ate no breakfast at all. Sometimes I go for weeks without eating