A simple meat diet, no sweets, fried food or even vegetables, a brisk leap out of bed in the mornings and not exhausting oneself “continually among women”. A 150-year-old self-help guide written by one of the United States’ most revered poets, Walt Whitman, has been rediscovered, offering some unique advice to 19th-century American man on how to obtain a more “noble physique” – and some of it wouldn’t seem so out of place today. 
 
 Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” is a 47,000-word treatise on how to be a real man, a work that had been long forgotten since it appeared in 13 weekly instalments in a long defunct New York newspaper over the autumn of 1858. In long and sometimes rambling prose, the poet extols the virtues of fresh air, of good footwear, of naked sunbathing and even of facial hair. A beard, said Whitman, is preferable in a man as “a great sanitary protection to the throat”. Too much “mere repetition” of sex, however, is to be avoided as that will produce only sickly, weedy children. 
 
 Dubbed “America’s poet”, Whitman was born in Long Island in 1819, and left school at 11 to start work as an office boy in a newspaper. He went on to become a prolific poet, essayist and journalist. 
 
 It was while looking through the work Whitman had produced under his journalistic pen names that University of Houston doctorate student Zachary Turpin found a single reference to “Manly Health” by Mose Velsor, and ordered the microfilm of the newspaper, the New York Atlas, from his library. By the time it turned up Turpin had forgotten all about it but managed to find an old microfilm player and was astonished to find the huge series, which adds greatly to the cache of Whitman’s known work, much of which has been lost down the years, buried in old newspapers thought too parochial to be digitised. Here he found Whitman, who was a middle-aged man at the time, urging the reader: “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice. Up! … Out in the morning! 
 
 “America has mentality enough, but needs a far nobler physique.” And “there is no doubt, as things now are, among the young men of modern civilised life, in cities, that a healthy manly virility seems to be almost lost – seems to have given place to a morbid, almost insane, pursuit of women, especially of the lowest ranges of them, for the mere repetition of the sensual pleasure. 
 
 “A man that exhausts himself continually among women is not fit to be, and cannot be, the father of sound and manly children,” he states. “They will be puny and scrofulous – a torment to themselves and to those who have the charge of them.” 
 
 Whitman, who found a surprising cult status as a plot device in the massively successful US TV series Breaking Bad, was gay, his poetry often suffused with homoerotic imagery. This series, said Whitman expert Ed Folsom, a University of Iowa English professor and editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, was written when the poet was struggling to make ends meet after his book Leaves of Grass was failing to sell and at a period where little is known about his life. “I see it as kind of a hymn to the male body – a love song to the male body,” Folsom told the Houston Chronicle. 
 
 Perhaps the view that might jar most with modern health and environmental concerns is Whitman’s view on diet – although not completely as he does advocate excluding pies and sugar. “In our view, if nine-tenths of all the various culinary preparations and combinations, vegetables, pastry, soups, stews, sweets, baked dishes, salads, things fried in grease, and all the vast array of confections, creams, pies, jellies, &c, were utterly swept aside from the habitual eating of the people, and a simple meat diet substituted in their place – we will be candid about it, and say in plain words, an almost exclusive meat diet – the result would be greatly, very greatly, in favour of that noble-bodied, pure-blooded and superior race we have had a leaning toward, in these articles of ours.” 
 
 The University of Iowa-based Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has published the entire 13-part series online – together with an introductory essay by Turpin. 
 
 Whitman often expressed anxiety about his work vanishing. “Some day I’ll die,” he told a friend, Horace Traubel. “Maybe surprise you all by a sudden disappearance: then where’ll my book be? That’s the one thing that excites me: most authors have the same dread – the dread that something or other essential that they have written may somehow become side-tracked, lost – lost forever.” 
 
 Happily for Whitman, this is one work which has been restored. 

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 Song Of My Self-Help: Follow Walt Whitman's 'Manly Health' Tips (Or Maybe Don't) 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hulton Archive/Getty Images 
 
 Eat lean meat. Bathe regularly. Wear comfortable shoes. Those are three pieces of self-help advice from an unlikely source — 19th-century poet and essayist Walt Whitman. 
 
 They come from a series of advice columns titled "Manly Health and Training" which Whitman — better known for Leaves of Grass and "O Captain! My Captain!" — wrote under the pseudonym Mose Velsor. The columns were discovered by University of Houston doctoral candidate Zachary Turpin. He tells NPR's Scott Simon that identifying Whitman as the true author was "a rare open-and-shut case." 
 
 "Besides it being signed with this pseudonym of his ... there was also draft language in his handwriting that matches the piece itself," Turpin explains. (You can listen to Simon and Turpin's full conversation in the audio link above.) 
 
 The articles offer tips on everything from what to eat (Whitman wasn't a fan of condiments) to how cold baths will make you "indifferent" to cold weather (we're skeptical). Here are some of our favorites, courtesy of the University of Iowa's Walt Whitman Quarterly Review: 
 
 On beards: "The beard is a great sanitary protection to the throat — for purposes of health it should always be worn, just as much as the hair of the head should be. Think what would be the result if the hair of the head should be carefully scraped off three or four times a week with the razor! Of course, the additional aches, neuralgias, colds, &c., would be immense. Well, it is just as bad with removing the natural protection of the neck; for nature indicates the necessity of that covering there, for full and sufficient reasons." 
 
 "The beard is a great sanitary protection to the throat — for purposes of health it should always be worn, just as much as the hair of the head should be. Think what would be the result if the hair of the head should be carefully scraped off three or four times a week with the razor! Of course, the additional aches, neuralgias, colds, &c., would be immense. Well, it is just as bad with removing the natural protection of the neck; for nature indicates the necessity of that covering there, for full and sufficient reasons." On what to eat: "If you want to know what is best to a hearty man, who takes plenty of exercise and fresh air, and don't want any pimples on his face or body, we will answer, (perhaps very much to your astonishment,) a simple diet of rare-cooked beef, seasoned with a little salt, and accompanied with stale bread or sea-biscuit. Mutton, if lean and tender, is also commendable. Pork should not be eaten. Butter, pepper, catsup, oil, and most of the 'dressings,' must also be eschewed. Lobster and chicken salad, cabbage, cucumbers, and even potatoes, are to be turned away from. Salted meats are not to be partaken of either." 
 
 "If you want to know what is best to a hearty man, who takes plenty of exercise and fresh air, and don't want any pimples on his face or body, we will answer, (perhaps very much to your astonishment,) a simple diet of rare-cooked beef, seasoned with a little salt, and accompanied with stale bread or sea-biscuit. Mutton, if lean and tender, is also commendable. Pork should not be eaten. Butter, pepper, catsup, oil, and most of the 'dressings,' must also be eschewed. Lobster and chicken salad, cabbage, cucumbers, and even potatoes, are to be turned away from. Salted meats are not to be partaken of either." On shoes and socks: "Probably there is no way to have good and easy boots or shoes, except to have lasts modeled exactly to the shape of the feet. This is well worth doing. Hundreds of times the cost of it are yearly spent in idle gratifications — while this, rightly looked upon, is indispensable to comfort and health. The feet, too, must be kept well clothed with thin socks in summer, and woolen in winter — and washed daily." 
 
 "Probably there is no way to have good and easy boots or shoes, except to have lasts modeled exactly to the shape of the feet. This is well worth doing. Hundreds of times the cost of it are yearly spent in idle gratifications — while this, rightly looked upon, is indispensable to comfort and health. The feet, too, must be kept well clothed with thin socks in summer, and woolen in winter — and washed daily." On cold baths: "We have spoken before of the morning ablutions — we mean the cool bath for the whole body. No doubt many of our readers will start back in dismay from such a proposition this weather [sic]; yet this is what we seriously mean. Not, be it well understood, for the feeble, the puny, the invalid, but for the robust, the young, and the sound only. This, cautiously begun, and by degrees formed into a habit, will so invigorate the whole surface as to make one indifferent during the day to the severest cold, and enjoy comfort in it, while others are chilly and shivering." 
 
 "We have spoken before of the morning ablutions — we mean the cool bath for the whole body. No doubt many of our readers will start back in dismay from such a proposition this weather [sic]; yet this is what we seriously mean. Not, be it well understood, for the feeble, the puny, the invalid, but for the robust, the young, and the sound only. This, cautiously begun, and by degrees formed into a habit, will so invigorate the whole surface as to make one indifferent during the day to the severest cold, and enjoy comfort in it, while others are chilly and shivering." On dancing: "We recommend dancing, as worthy of attention, in a different manner from what use is generally made of that amusement; namely, as capable of being made a great help to develop the flexibility and strength of the hips, knees, muscles of the calf, ankles, and feet. Dancing, on true principles, would have ultimate reference to that, and would then, as an inevitable result, bring grace of movement along with it." 
 
 Whitman's 13-part "Manly Health and Training" series was originally published in the New York Atlas in 1858, and is now being republished by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. You can read the full text of his columns here. 
 
 Nicole Cohen contributed to this story.
– A newly discovered work positions famous American poet Walt Whitman as the Ron Swanson of the 19th century. The New York Times reports University of Houston graduate student Zachary Turpin found a long-lost advice series titled Manly Health and Training written by Whitman under the pen name Mose Velsor for the New York Atlas in 1858. Over 13 entries and 47,000 words, Whitman lays out his recipe for "a perfect body, a perfect blood." According to the Guardian, this was needed because—as Whitman puts it—"America has mentality enough, but needs a far nobler physique." The column touches on everything from diet and footwear to cold baths and naked sunbathing. "It's sort of an insane document," Turpin tells the Times. "Let the main part of the diet be meat, to the exclusion of all else," Whitman wrote. He warned against butter, pepper, ketchup, lobster, cucumbers, potatoes, chicken salad, and more, NPR reports. He was also a big fan of facial hair. "The beard is a great sanitary protection to the throat—for purposes of health it should always be worn." For sport, he favored dance and bare-knuckle boxing, which will make the US “a hardy, robust, and combative nation." But Whitman, famous for his homoerotic poems, warns against spending time "continually among women." He worries "manly virility" has been lost to the "almost insane pursuit of women ... for the mere repetition of the sensual pleasure." The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has published all 13 entries of Manly Health and Training. (A lost Whitman poem was found in 2014.)