Fletcherism

One of America’s earliest weight-reduction experts and food reformers was a rotund “Mr. Five-by-Five” named Horace Fletcher (1849–1919). An immensely successful businessman, Fletcher had amassed an outsize fortune by the age of forty, but his health had not similarly prospered. At forty, all his hair had turned white, and he was calamitously fat. On his five-foot-five frame, he carried 205 pounds. Worst of all, no longer could Fletcher, who had been noted for his prodigious strength and athleticism as a young Dartmouth College undergraduate, even take a short walk or climb a flight of stairs without puffing and straining. He felt, he said, “like a thing fit but to be thrown on the scrap-heap.” So in his late forties—since medical nostrums had been unavailing—he decided to try to cure his health problems on his own. He recounts his triumphal progress in two books: The ABZ of Human Nutrition and How I Became Young at 60.