This brings us to some simple form of exercise you can do at this time which will help the bowels to empty themselves by toning the muscles of the abdomen――the stomach, you call it.
These exercises consist in bending the body from your waist several times, then swinging from side to side. You do this with your feet close together and with straightened knees. Bend forwards and downwards, touching the floor with the tips of your fingers without bending the knees. Keep it up until you can do it without effort. Then swing your body from side to side, twisting and turning from the hips. Nothing will give you a more graceful figure than these forms of movements. Keep up this exercise all through your active life, and with all the other advice I have and shall give you, you can be attractive even when the gray hairs have made their appearance.
It is not the purpose of these Chats to advise you in purely medical matters, that is to tell you what to do in illness and what medicines to take. The purpose of these talks is to put you in possession of knowledge that will bring you to full womanhood, a strong, healthy woman to whom marriage and children will be a state of happiness for both husband and wife, or to a state of content, if you choose “single blessedness.” But in the matter of constipation, I think it will do no harm to tell you that, if you will take once a week a tablespoonful of SODIUM PHOSPHATE, you will be benefited. This sodium phosphate should be taken before breakfast in a full glass of water.
What about thin hair, split hairs, that dead-feeling hair?
If this condition is found in the young woman, it is ninety-nine times out of a hundred her own fault, or due to her ignorance of what the scalp and hair need.
It is because she has piled a lot of dead and often diseased hair on top of her healthy and growing hair. Put a bunch of dead matter upon live and growing matter and what is the result? Death, decay!
Most of the fashions in hair and dress originate in those whose lives and age compel some artificial aid to attract attention. These foolish and freakish fashions are not for the young woman to adopt. Take the fashion of long trains, for example. The women of Paris seldom walk, they go about in automobiles or carriages. Now, sitting in these open conveyances it attracts attention to have a long folding train wrapped around the sitting figure and pulled up at the ankles to show a dainty slipper and silken hosiery. Don’t you see how ridiculous it is for a good young woman who has to walk to her daily work or school, to try to copy a fashion which is intended for an entirely different class of women? Yet, when trains were the fashion, you all did it.