What I did not realize was that the unwonted exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did at dinner--and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller's prepared food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttle-fish bone and then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a meal.

I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder.

So, never associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the resigned conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there was nothing for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the end of my mortal chapter being fat, fatter and perhaps fattest.

I'd just make the best of it.
And I'd use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a walk.
Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago something else happened.

And on top of that something else--to wit: The Great Reduction.
Of the Great Reduction more anon..