Hints for Bilious Billys and Pepless Pollys

It's important when dieting to eat enough of the right foods to get proper nutrition for inner health. I will pass along to you, verbatim, morsels from the advice of Donald G. Cooley in his book, Eat and Get Slim, 1949: "What do the oomph girls have that you haven't got? Nothing maybe. A glint in the eye, buoyant health, energy, sound nervous and glandular systems- these are a few of the ingredients of oomph or romance quotient or sex appeal or whatever you want to call the indefinable qualities of itness, and they are much the same for men and women. "We may pity the Bilious Billys, the Pepless Pollys, and the Tired Tillies of our acquaintance, but there isn't any law that makes us like them. Poor folk! They want to have loads of friends, like everybody else, yet they go around with an anxious drawn-through-a-knothole look, emitting plaintive sounds that blend into a dirge like drone of weariness and weakness. It never seems to occur to them that to have friends you must have steam pressure.

"Maybe you think there is no such thing as a malnourished personality. But you probably made your own observations on the subject long ago. Know any husbands you don't dare say "good morning" to until they've had their breakfasts? Or any wives who are edgy and jumpy until they've had their morning coffee? The irascibility of the dyspeptic is a matter of folklore, and many's the office where the smart operators never approach the big shot for a raise or a favorable decision until he has been made amiable by lunch.

"When breakfast is a chunk of grapefruit and a cup of coffee, it's a little unreasonable to expect to be a poised and charming person all morning on the strength of it.

"It is a splendid idea to reduce one's ideal weight, but bad business to go below it, as many college girls have found. On wacky self-selected reducing diets they can become thin enough to slip into the slinkiest evening dresses molded for the male eye. Unhappily, something happens to their personalities. They burst easily into tears, make much of fancied slights, develop a whiny-edge to the voice, and bewilder their boyfriends by their scrappiness. The course of true love may not run smooth, but there's no point in stewing the road with tacks."