ABSTRACT
Originated by Horace Fletcher, “fletcherizing” advocated chewing food so thoroughly that all flavor was extracted and the remains involuntarily swallowed; therefore, people would eat less, digest their food more easily, and more efficiently use the food they ate. However quixotic his doctrine may have seemed, Fletcher cited his own life as a testament to its value. In the early 1890s, in his late forties, Fletcher's weight had ballooned to 205 pounds on a five-foot, five-and-one-half-inch frame. Denied a life insurance policy due to his weight, Fletcher used his program over a four-month period to pare down to 169 pounds, a weight he remained at or below for the last twenty years of his life. He noted the broader ramifications of his feat in a letter to his lawyer in 1898:
I have been experimenting with about a dozen people … and [have] prove[n] my discovery to be applicable to any condition. It has not only cured obesity and leanness … but I have entirely cured indigestion, bleeding piles, catarrh, pimpled skin and a variety of other ailments.
