Now overweight individuals have always been considered a joke, but you are a joke no longer.
Instead of being looked upon with friendly tolerance and amusement, you are now viewed with distrust, suspicion, and even aversion!
You never wanted to be big anyway, but you did not know how to reduce, and it is proverbial how little you eat.
Why, there is Mrs. Brown, who is beautifully thin, and she eats twice as much as you do, and does not gain a pound.
You know positively that eating has nothing to do with it, for one time you dieted, didn't eat a thing but what the doctor ordered, besides your regular meals, and you actually gained.
You are in despair about being anything but fat, and—! how you hate it. But cheer up. I will save you; yea, even as I have saved myself and many, many others, so will I save you.
It is not in vain that all my life I have had to fight the too, too solid. Why, I can remember when I was a child I was always being consoled by being told that I would outgrow it, and that when I matured I would have some shape.
Never can I tell pathetically "when I was married I weighed only one hundred eighteen, and look at me now."
No, I was a delicate slip of one hundred and sixty-five when I was taken.
I never will tell you how much I have weighed, I am so thoroughly ashamed of it, but my normal weight is one hundred and fifty pounds, and at one time there was seventy pounds more of me than there is now, or has been since I knew how to control it.
I was not so shameless as that very long, and as I look back upon that short period I feel like refunding the comfortable salary received as superintendent of an hospital; for I know I was only sixty-five per cent efficient, for efficiency decreases in direct proportion as excess weight increases.
Everybody knows it.
