Learn To Respect Your Limitations
Herbert M Shelton
Hygienic Review August 1973

   Nutrition and reproduction are two of the leading functions of the body.
When they are abused the body and mind become perverted and it is no longer
possible to evolve the potentials latent in the individual. Few people ever
come into full possession of their biological legacies. They sell their
birthright for a mess of pottage a few years of sensuality, trampling their
potentialities by debaucheries. Food and drink, sex and gold (guts, gold and
gonads) the unholy trinity, reduced them to mediocre beings, without strength
of body and mind to achieve even a small part of their inherent potential.

   Excesses not only spoil love, they spoil digestion. The food "turns
against" the glutton as certainly as love turns to the divorce court when
excess has destroyed it. Life is made miserable by excess which always leads
to disease. Diseases are palliated, but never remedied, for the reason that
the cause is never removed.

   Our moralists and religionists hold that morality and health are poles
apart. They are so accustomed to partitioning man and dealing with only one
part of him that they are unable to grasp the fact that man is a unitary
being. Despising food, health and digestion in their superior codes of
ethics, overlooking the need for proper care of the body in producing and
maintaining a normal man or woman, they concentrate their contemplation upon
those "higher" attributes of man, ethics, morality, religion. The result is a
world filled with diseased and undisciplined people, a world full of sick
moralists and religionists. Normal people are self-controlled and poised;
abnormal people are impulsive, unpoised and filled with bad mental and
physical habits. Any system of ethics that neglects this fundamental fact is
divorced from life, from man. It is unrealistic and unworkable. The monstrous
incongruity existing between pretensions and confessions of the sick
Christian and the consequences of his mental and physical habits should lead
to a realization of the fact that neglect of the body leads to evil.

   Both the religious man and the free thinker will assert that this is an
unkind providence. It is not; it is freedom. It is the ability of man to
choose a life of self-control or a life of self-indulgence and take the
consequences of either course of action, "Intellect," says Tilden, "does not
thrive under prohibition. If man cannot thrive under freedom, he is unfit to
live, and he becomes his own executioner. "

   Medical "science" coddles man and spends much of its time manufacturing
alibis for those who persist in abusing their privileges of enjoying.
Physicians revel in pathology, thinking to discover the cause of man's ills
in the necropsy room. They refuse to look for it in life. To the dead they go
in their search for the cause of the diseases of the living. In the living,
they spend their time palliating symptoms and encouraging the patient in the
very ways of life that are responsible for his ills. When the man dies, the
physician makes out a death certificate, which, instead of saying: died of
too much food or of alcohol, consoles the friends and relatives by saying
that he died of heart disease. He is a liar and all of the mortality
statistics based on lies of this kind are as false as the "medical science"
that makes out such death certificates. The alleged cause of the sickness is
given a fancy Greek or Latin name which removes the slightest suspicion that
the sick person is in the least responsible for his illness, or that the dead
man committed suicide executed himself and everybody is satisfied. That when
sensuality is finished it brings death, is a truth that neither the patient,
his friends nor his physician is willing to acknowledge. For do they not know
that sensuality brings enjoyment, happiness, and that microbes and viruses
cause man's diseases?

   Not until we evolve to the point where we recognize that truth is more
important than lies, will we cease our practice of veiling the truth about
everything and promoting comforting fallacies. The lies that "your eyes shall
be opened and ye shall be as gods" and "ye shall not surely die," are
pleasing to sensualists and ambitious seekers after wealth and power. Man
rejects the teaching that "the truth shall make you free." The stupid but
wily serpent that haunts their garden of delight subtly whispers into their
all too willing ears: Give no heed to the advice of those who presume to
know. Eat of the forbidden fruit, for by so doing you will become as gods.
When "your time comes" you will die and not before. Perish the thought that
you can commit suicide; that you can by any means shorten your predestined
length of life. The, serpent is likely to be dressed in the guise of a
physician, who will tell you that if you are sick he can cure you, that if
you are well he can immunize you against sickness. He will probably be armed
with a load of lying statistics that "prove" that if your ancestors were
long-lived you will be, and there is nothing you can do to shorten your life;
if your ancestors were short lived you will be, and there is nothing you can
do to lengthen your life.

   Self-indulgence to the point of enervation is the greatest single cause of
disease known to man. Enervation checks elimination, thus retaining the
poisonous product of metabolism in the blood-toxemia. Premature death is the
penalty for sensuality, and it came with law and order, with biology, before
man had developed the biological sciences. Although priests and physicians
are in the habit of annulling penalties with prayers, indulgences, panaceas,
immunizers, cures and all kinds of mutilations of the body, this law is
inexorable and immutable. Fool the people as they will with their plans of
vicarious salvation, they have not yet found, nor will ever find a means of
annulling a single law of life and enable man to dance without paying the
fiddler.

   View the mortality statistics-see the great army of lives that are yearly
snuffed out twenty to a hundred years prematurely-the causes of death are
given as heart disease, apoplexy, uremia, acidosis, cancer, Bright's disease,
diabetes, a short, unexpected pneumonia, or other symptom-complex-but all of
these so-called diseases are but results of a subtle intoxication, the
ripened fruit of the lotus flower of pleasure carried beyond limitations.
Abuse of privileges brings as its punishment, discomfort, organic change and
premature death.

   Enjoyment of biologically legitimate pleasures within nerve limitation,
which means short of sufficient enervation to check elimination, is
healthful; but when excess is practiced nerve energy is dissipated in excess
of supply, and enervation is the result. Add to toxemia (auto-developed
poisoning) the insidious poisoning of tobacco, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol,
gastrointestinal putrescence (the result of wrong eating and overeating), and
a vulnerable state of the body results which is progressive, explosive and
dangerous. All heart stimulants enervate the heart. In nervous and emotional
people the heart often becomes so irritable that a slight stimulation from
toxin or an unusual emotion may result in spasm of the heart, causing death
from "heart failure."

   The signs and symptoms of toxic saturation are variable in character.
Seldom does a single overindulgence produce more than a passing discomfort,
but habitual overindulgence-in eating, in sex, in enjoying, in work, etc.
-slowly but surely builds up a toxic saturation which requires only the
slightest added overtaxing of the nerve energy to result in a crisis. The
three most common and socially accepted indoor sports are overeating, sexual
overindulgence and drinking (alcoholic liquors). These are so widespread, so
commonly practiced and so fully accepted that hardly any one questions these
sports, no one recognizes that there is anything abnormal in such
indulgences,

   Until we have learned that overindulgence overtaxes the nervous system,
that, in the case of the sick man or woman, overeating, drinking, etc., place
a heavy burden upon the organs of elimination, that the enervating effects of
overindulgence of all kinds reduce the functioning powers of the excretory
organs, we are in no position to understand how our pleasures build our
diseases. It is a big job for the excretory organs of a vigorous and healthy
person to get rid of his habitual excesses; it is a much more difficult task
for the excretory organs of a sick person to accomplish, and they simply do
not do it.

   If overwork, sexual excesses, habitual stimulation, emotional irritations,
over bathing, over-sunning and a host of other enervating pastimes overtax
the powers of the healthy and strong and, if persisted in, weaken and impair
the most vigorous organism, how much more will they overtax the weak and
impaired organism! If the digestive system, of the strong and robust has
difficulty in disposing of the three heavy meals daily eaten by our people,
how much greater difficulty must the digestive system of the weak and ailing
have in disposing of the same amount of food! Yet, is it not common to advise
the sick to eat more, rather than less, in a vain endeavor to build them up?
With centuries of experience behind us we seem not to have learned that
overeating does not produce strength and functioning power. It will not even
maintain the strength already possessed. "Plenty of good nourishing food to
keep up the strength" of the sick is an even greater fallacy than the same
overeating to keep up the strength of the strong and vigorous. Basically it
is the same fallacy in both instances, but in the weak and sick its effects
are more immediate and pronounced.

   To save the people of this land from the inanities and insanities of
scientific medicine, we need a Pentecostal outpouring of common sense. When
the people demand education instead of immunization, removal of causes
instead of cures, the medical profession will know that its day is drawing to
a close. It will know that its age long dream of reaching therapeutic
perfection is never to be realized and that the whole sorry muss of
therapeutic monstrosities is headed for a well-deserved oblivion. When the
people really understand what disease is and what its cause is, they will be
in a position to save themselves, both from suffering and from the worse evil
of the two-treatment, both medical and cultistic.

   Enervation, however produced, not only inhibits excretion, but it also
checks secretion. The checking of digestive secretions lowers digestive
power. The more enervated the individual, the less digestive power he
possesses. Instead, in such a state of functional weakness, of reducing the
daily food intake in keeping with the lowered digestive power that remains,
it is customary to continue the habitual gluttony, even under the advice of
practitioners of the various schools of so-called healing, or of increasing
the amount of food eaten, in the hope that "plenty of good nourishing food"
will increase the power to digest and utilize food. Not more digestive power
but more food to digest, is the prescription when digestive function has been
impaired by lowering of nerve energy.

   Cicero may have been speaking, either from personal experience or as a
careful observer of the men around him, when he declared: "Better be a
temperate old man than a lascivious youth"; when he declared temperance to be
a "bridle of gold" that makes a man like unto a god, for, continuing, it
"will transform a beast to a man" and "it will make a man into a god." The
gods Cicero knew, especially those who sat on the throne of the Caesars, were
intemperate beasts, made so by debauchery and conceit.

   The days of reckless indulgence, the days of excesses at the table, must
become and remain memories that are no longer able to whet jaded appetites.
Now there is nothing left for our Solomons save to write their proverbs and
complain that all is vanity and vexation of spirit; there is nothing left for
our Davids but to write their Psalms. The old man who has had his day and
wasted it, now sits by his fireside and bemoans the fact that he is no longer
young; no longer can he indulge his appetites and passions as though life has
no limitations and vigor will last forever. His pleasures are now old
memories and his regrets are his constant companions. The man who does not
respect his limitations, but indulges excessively, becomes enervated, fails
to eliminate, builds toxemia and develops all kinds of symptoms. Then he is
in line to be humbugged by all kinds of cures.

   Every individual, whatever his age, has a certain amount of potential
functioning power and when he has learned his limitations concerning food,
pleasure, work, social life, etc., and has learned to respect his
limitations, he will continue to live within his capacities and thus will go
on living long after his carelessly living neighbors have been ushered into
the henceforth by the surgeon or the hypodermic-armed physician.

   The surfeited are disintegrating and their numbers dwindle daily, were it
not for the fact that their ranks are continually replenished from new
converts to the merry chase after pleasure. When warned by friends and
advisers, these young people, who are about to embark upon the "pace that
kills" brush aside the advice and point out that others are doing the same
with apparent impunity. The pace-setters are equally blind and deaf to
counsel. They never tire of trying to convince others that they are "very
moderate" compared with Jones or Smith. My grandfather smoked all his life,
they assure us, and he died at the age of ninety. "Good food never hurt
anybody; I am going to have my share of it. " "We live but once, we may as
well enjoy life while we can. "

   It is not good food that is objected to; but excess. It is not enjoying
life that we are cautioned against; but excesses. Let the people have good
food and let them enjoy life; but if they want to go on enjoying it and not
end up in a wheel chair, let them stay within their normal limitations. When
they have enervated themselves by their excesses until they are suffering all
the discomforts described in the best medical texts and are being serviced by
specialists and having their organs removed, their pains palliated and their
secretions substituted for by extracts from the glands of Armour and Co.'s
bulls and goats, they will discover that there is not much pleasure left in
life. They have come to the end PC their "enjoying life" long before they
reach the end of life itself. What a travesty on real life! What a mockery of
genuine enjoyment!

   They and their medical advisers never cautioned them against their
excesses in the days when they were young and vigorous; rather, they told
them that disease is due to germs and viruses and that they should go out and
have a good time. "Eat anything you darn please," and "eat anything that
agrees with you," they were told. Food combining is a senseless fad. Tobacco
and alcohol, tea and coffee "in moderation" are harmless."

   Excessive eating builds plethora, nasal catarrh, inflammation and
ulceration of mucous membranes. When these subjects develop a nose bleed it
tends to continue bleeding until the excess of blood is expelled. Nicotine
poisoning dulls sensibility. Taste, smell, sight, hearing are more or less
impaired by indulgence in tobacco. The vasometer nervous system is affected
by nicotine. The trophic or nutritional system is also impaired, the heart is
overworked and the arteries are hardened. The victim of the nicotine habit
either loses weight or becomes obese.

   So long as a man's nerve balance is on the positive side of the scale, he
may boast that his habits are not injuring him, but the sickness and
death-rate between the ages of thirty and forty-five indicate that his habits
have drained him of energy to the danger point by this period of life. When
men and women in the very prime of life are prostrated and die, as it is
said, of acute disease, there must be a cause and this cause is not to be
found in mere fortuitous causes. Lowered ability to live must be the answer.
Persistent stimulation lowers the ability to live.

        Man builds his own grotesqueness nature never makes a clown of old age.
Dotage and dribbling belong to diseases not to old age. The normal man's
adjustments to ordinary changes in his environmental stresses are
unconscious, as they should be. Consulting physicians and other types of
disease-treaters who frighten you is a very bad and disease-building habit.
To tell a sick man the cause of his trouble and educate him into the how of
correcting it should dispel fear. The childish assertion that teaching people
to eat carefully, live carefully and to care for the body prudently is
disease-building or that it causes worry about the body is tantamount to a
condemnation of education. Certainly we can teach the truth about life and
living and about the body and its care without producing either bodily
sickness or mental disturbance. We have taught children the dangers of guns
without creating any trouble. Can we not teach them the injury that comes
from other sources without creating mischief? Is there anything wrong with
imparting proper knowledge on any subject to people?

   When all the people are well aware that they build their own disease and
that they do their own recovering, there will be a demand for schools of
health to supplant the present schools (hospitals) that devote much time to
cultivating the sick habit.