The Fun of Getting Thin: How to be Happy and Reduce the Waist Line
Samuel G Blythe
1912

Summary of book:
This is a calorie reduction diet guide. The basic idea is to cut whatever percentage of excess food you are eating, and he advocates giving up alcohol. He also wrote a guide to quitting drinking called Cutting it out: how to get on the waterwagon and stay there.

I didn’t know anything about the author until after I read it, but I now know that he was a newspaper man. Most famously, he wrote the “Buy American” article during the Depression for the Saturday Evening Post.

Should you read this?
If you are interested in 100 year old diet guides or want motivation to eat smaller portions you might enjoy it. It is short. He goes over all the diets and exercise plans that he’s done. He’s anti-medicine for weight loss. It’s remarkable how little has really changed in the dieting world over the past century.

However, he starts the book with a sexist comment that some women might find triggering (sadly, the sentiment he shares is still popular today), and there are at least two racist references.

For those who want to know the meat without reading it, I can sum up his diet plan-
He did some quick math and figured he was eating 60% more than he needed. He simply stopped eating 60% more than he had before. No calorie counting was involved. He gave up breads at breakfast for mostly proteins, skipped lunch most of the time, and ate considerably less than he used to at supper. He stopped alcohol completely and claims to never have had a sweet tooth, especially as a drinker. Once his weight was where he wanted, he let himself eat a bit more (what modern dieters call maintenance calories) and never went back to alcohol. His exercise before weight loss was usually punishing runs. He stopped that and just walked to work more often.

One interesting aspect that he devotes time to is how men tend to discourage each other from losing weight and treat dieting as some sort of mental illness. This is probably true in many male circles to this day, and all people who lose weight experience people who try to discourage them once their weight loss really starts to show.

Where to find:
Amazon
Project Gutenberg