Ned Wayburn Show Girls, Follies of 1922

How to Lose Weight

To get rid of superfluous avoirdupois is one of the necessary steps to beauty. A ponderous actress has a limited field. Certain character parts, a few vaudeville acts, a singing turn, or a burlesquing of her own abnormality (if she has the personality to carry it off with), and there her availability for stage purposes ends. But you cannot dance and waddle at the same time. “It isn’t done.” If you aspire to be the kind of stage dancer that the public demands and that we produce in our courses, you will have to submit to diet and exercise, the only coin of the realm that will buy physical beauty and perfect development. There is no other way. Medicines for this purpose are dangerous, because they contain poisons, like arsenic and mercury. Make up your mind to either abandon all hope of a dancing career, or to faithfully follow the prescribed routine of proper exercise and non-fattening foods. If you continue to take into your body the foods that build fatty tissue, no exercise alone will dispose of the excess fat that is sure to result. While our exercises in the studio do help greatly, they cannot entirely correct a basically wrong condition unless supplemented by proper diet. And diet alone is not sufficient, either; you must have the exercises along with it.

Diet to Decrease Weight

You must partake of no soups, nothing that is fried, no gravies. The only meats that you will be permitted to eat are roast lamb, lamb chops, broiled or boiled white fish, or white meat of chicken or turkey; no other meats of any kind, no other fish of any kind.

Vegetables. You may have any green vegetables, especially plain spinach, carrots, string beans, lettuce, celery, onions, sliced tomatoes, never any stewed tomatoes or beets. But you can have beet tops. Radishes are hard to digest.

You are not permitted to have any pastry, and by that is meant pie, cakes or cookies; no candies of any kind; no ice cream or ice cream sodas, no sarsaparilla or ginger ale, no liquor, no smoking, no cigarettes. You are not to take any liquids while having your meals.

You are not to partake of whole milk, cream, or white bread. Use little or no sugar or butter. The only kind of bread that you are permitted to eat is the whole-wheat bread, gluten bread, or whole rye bread. You may take stale bread toasted. Gluten bread is good when toasted.

You are prohibited from taking coffee. You may take very weak tea—very weak—but there should be no sugar in the tea, nor should there be any cream in it. You may have a slice of lemon in your tea. Lemon juice can be squeezed on the lettuce instead of using sugar or rich dressing. Vinegar on the lettuce or spinach, and plenty of it, is permissible.

Buttermilk is excellent, and so is postum, but the postum should be taken without sugar and used with hot skimmed milk, not cream.

For fruits: take baked apple, applesauce, grapefruit, orange juice, raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries, a few strawberries—not many—occasionally.

About potatoes: no potatoes except a baked white potato, occasionally—no sweet potatoes, no French fried, home fried, hashed or creamed potatoes—no mashed potatoes; the only kind you are permitted to partake of being the well-baked white potato, and you may eat the skins if you like, but do not butter the potato.

For cereals: take bran, bran flakes or hominy—but the hominy must be cooked for one hour and a half. That is the best cereal for your diet. The hominy should be flavored with about one-half teaspoonful of currant jelly, put into the hominy and stirred up, just to give it a little taste. Do not use any cream, milk or sugar on your hominy, which is really the most nutritious cereal when cooked this length of time.

I am reproducing here the Ned Wayburn daily menu for a reducing diet. It is one I have worked out carefully and studiously and used successfully on many of my pupils and myself. By means of this diet and my studio exercise I reduced myself from 262 pounds to 207 pounds in twelve weeks—a loss of 55 pounds, and felt better when I got through than I did when I began, but, I do not advise anyone taking off weight too fast. With my method of reducing all of the unhealthy fatty tissue will be gotten rid of before the remaining firm muscular tissue will be distributed about the body. You may get thinner in the face first, and about the thighs last. Be patient; it may take you six months or longer. Unless you have gland trouble or some other serious disorder it will go in time, provided you will work to get rid of it and stick to the diet for not less than three months. Those taking the conditioning work lose an average of about one pound per week, while those who are trying to build up gain about one-half pound each week after they have gotten rid of all the unhealthy unnecessary tissue, those underweight frequently losing five pounds before they begin to show any gain. It will surely bring back youthful buoyancy and insure your health and figure for the future. After you have succeeded in getting down to the right poundage you can go on my balanced diet for those who have reduced, but you will still have to do about ten minutes of my exercises every morning, and you must never over-eat again.

Hamburger steak with tomato sauce (2 cakes); string beans or asparagus; 1 thin slice rye bread; 1 small pat butter; glass of skimmed milk or coffee with skimmed milk; raw apple, orange or pear.

Note: If overweight is excessive omit all desserts given in menus except raw unsweetened fruits.

Any one of the above breakfasts contains 350 calories of heat or energy. Any one of the above luncheons contains 500 calories. Any one of the above dinners contains 650 calories. The day’s total will be 1500 calories.

You will no doubt be interested in hearing the story of a young lady, Miss Ann Constance, who came to me a little over a year ago to be reduced. She was sixteen years old, was five feet five inches in height and weighed one hundred and seventy-nine pounds. At the end of nine months, under the treatment I am recommending for those who are overweight, she tipped the scales at one hundred and nineteen pounds. Her photographs, in this book, taken “before and after,” will tell the story better than I can in words. Miss Constance is in better health today than she has ever been before in her life; and she has become an exceedingly good dancer—recently with the Greenwich Village Follies and at this writing just beginning a career in the movies with the Famous Players at their Long Island Studios. She is, however, only one of many girls whom my diets and exercises have helped.

ANN CONSTANCE.
(Before she entered the Ned Wayburn Studios.)

ANN CONSTANCE.
(After she entered the Ned Wayburn Studios.)

We have never failed in reducing any of our pupils who came to us for that purpose, but we have to have their coöperation, of course. Quite recently we had a very puzzling case that challenged the Sherlock Holmes in us, and I think it will interest you to know how we solved it.

A young lady of really huge proportions, resident of another city, called on me at the studio accompanied by her mother, and placed herself in my charge for reducing. I studied her, arranged a special diet for her and she entered the class in limbering and stretching. I watch the progress of all my pupils, and expect them to record the change in their weights every week. I watched this young lady with especial care, and was dumbfounded to notice that she was steadily gaining in weight. She never lost a pound but kept on adding fat to more fat all the time, notwithstanding that she was working her head off in the classroom—when she came to class. She skipped seven lessons of the twenty in the first month’s course, reporting for only thirteen, finally insisting that the lessons were not doing her any good.

I felt that there must be something wrong and wrote the mother of the girl about it, as she had requested me to do. She told me that the girl had a charge account at a certain hotel where she took her meals. I asked the mother if it would be possible for me to get the meal checks signed by her daughter, which would show just what she had eaten. The meal checks were turned over to me. I found that the girl had been eating the prohibited things; that about once in two weeks she had followed my diet, and at every other time she had eaten everything she liked—enormous meals, consisting of starchy foods and all sorts of desserts—mostly sweets. I also found out that she had been taking some of the other girls at the studio along with her, fattening them up. The mother was inclined to be easy with the girl. I called her father’s attention to the matter, because the girl paid no attention at all to me, and as far as I could see was hurting the school. Of course she was only fooling herself.

I insisted that we were not going to fail with her, and her father came to New York to see me. About this time the girl was taken ill, suffering with acute indigestion and finally the mumps. On my advice her father took her home. Lately I have heard from the young lady, and she wants to re-enter the school. If I decide to take her back, she will have to keep strictly to her diet and attend regularly, which I believe she is now ready to do, as she has gained much weight since leaving here.

Lillian Russell was a beautiful woman, with a personality and a stage presence. She was fond of the good things in life, and was obliged to watch carefully a tendency to embonpoint. She has gone on record as saying that lots of walking, lots of dancing, and two meals a day was all the reducing exercise she ever employed. She advised a light breakfast, no luncheon, and a good dinner, with no between-meals, no “piecing,” no candy. The chief trouble with this plan is, that one is apt to become ravenous by dinnertime and over eat at that meal, and thus undo what you are attempting. The best way is to follow the Ned Wayburn diet faithfully, and take three meals each day, just as I have suggested.

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