Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1885 — When Your Girth Increases. [ARTICLE]

When Your Girth Increases.

There is that occasional visit to the tailor, who, tape in hand, announces in commercial monotone to the listening clerk the various measurements of our girth t and congratulates us on the gradual increase thereof. He never in his life saw you looking so well, and “fancy, sir, you are another inch below your armpits”—a good deal below—“since last year!” insiduously intimating than in another year or so you will have nearly as fine a chest as Heenan ! And you, poor, deluded victim, are more than half willing to believe that your increasing size is an equivalent to increasing health and strength, especial as your wife emphatically takes that view, and regards augmenting portliness with approval. Ten years have now passed away since you were forty, and by Weight i2< stone, a fair proportion for your height and build. Now you turn the scale to one stone more, every ounce of which is fat —-extra weight to be carried through all the labors of life. If you continue your present dietary and habitsand live five or seven years more, the burden of fat will be doubled, and that insinuating tailor will be still congratulating you. Meantime you are running the race ot life”—a figure of speech less appropriate to you at the present moment than it formerly was—handicapped by a weight which makes active movement difficult, upstairs ascents troublesome, respiration thick and panting. Not one man in fifty lives to a good old age in this condition. The typical man of 80 or 90 years, still retaining a respectable amount of energy of body and mind, is lean and spare, and lives on slender rations. Neither your heart nor your lungs can act easily and healthily, being oppressed by the gradually-gath-ering fat around them. And this because you continue to eat and drink as you did, or even more luxuriously than you did, when youth and activity disposed of that moiety of food which was consumed over and above what the body required for sustenance. Such is the import of that balance of unexpended aliment which your tailor and your foolish friends admire, and the gradual disappearance of which, should you recover your senses and diminish it, they will still deplore, half-frightening you back to your old habits again by saying: “You are growing thin. What can be the matter with you?" Insane and mischievous delusion. —Sir Henry Thompson, in the nineteenth Century.