Book Review: French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano
Book: French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano
Genre: Self help
Publisher: Borzoi Books
Publication date: 2005
Pages: 263
Source: Library
Summary: The French paradox: dine on Duck à l’Orange and goat cheese, eat chocolate and croissants, and drink wine and champagne while staying slim and healthy. Mireille Guiliano, president and CEO of the U.S. affiliate of champagne producer Clicquot, splits her time between Paris and New York and is in the perfect position to explain this apparent contradiction.
Thoughts: The first time I read this book, I got as far as page 4:
In America as an exchange student, I suffered a catastrophe that I was totally unprepared for: a twenty-pound catastrophe. It sent me into a wilderness from which I had to find my way back.
At the time, I was 70 pounds overweight and I was pretty sure that I had nothing to learn from someone who considered 20 pounds a catastrophe. You have no idea, lady, was my thought and I sent the book packing back to the library.
As I am preparing to go to France in late May, however, I thought this might be a good time to give this book another try. I really want to leave for France at the low end of my maintenance range but on April 1, I was hovering above the top end of my maintenance range. Oops. Now, with a goal of about five pounds to lose, French Women Don’t Get Fat seemed more appropriate.
The first phase is to simply write down everything you eat for three weeks. Don’t worry about measuring or calories. This is just some data to analyze. I didn’t need the data, but this helped me step back and accept a couple of realities that I’d been trying to deny.
1. A serving of bread is one slice and that’s all I need at a time. When my bread first comes out of the bread machine, it’s impossible to slice it thin. One slice is plenty, especially if I eat it slowly and appreciate it in the French way. If I really want a sandwich with two slices, I can use the previous loaf and make very thin slices. I rarely eat sandwiches anyway; they are just my excuse for believing that a serving is two slices.
2. Three balanced meals a day with one or two small snacks works best for me. The Game On Diet, I’m afraid, gave me a bad habit with its concept of five small meals a day. Now, I feel entitled to five meals a day, but they’ve grown over time! Guiliano in French Women Don’t Get Fat advises to not allow yourself to get hungry, but I think that’s better advice for people who aren’t recovering overeaters. For me, the best advice came from the books by Judith Beck (Book Review: The Beck Diet Solution by Judith S. Beck): hunger is not an emergency. If I’m hungry in the early evening, it doesn’t mean it’s time for a snack, it means it’s time to get supper started.
I ignored the second phase of eating leek soup for 48 hours. That prescription arrived on page 25 after a lot of talk about balance and patience that didn’t seem to match up with the crash diet mentality of a weekend of leek soup. Odd. I considered looking at The Parisian Diet by Dr. Jean-Michael Cohen until I read this review by Yoni Freedhoff: Weighty Matters: Diet Book Review: The Parisian Diet. Freedhoff considered the advice sound. When he got to the diets, though, they contradicted the text by being way too low in calories. With those two pieces of evidence, a weekend of leek soup in French Women Don’t Get Fat and very low calorie plans in The Parisian Diet, one might conclude that when the French claim that they don’t do extreme diets, they are lying.
Never mind. I always ignore the quick start or cleanse or reset phase of any diet plan that has multiple phases. In my experience, pounds lost slowly stay off so I always skip any rapid start program.
The third phase is a process called recasting and is meant to be three months of paying attention. This is a time for self-examination and cost-benefit analysis. If I’m eating ice cream every day, could I make it a once a week treat at an ice cream parlor and keep it out of the house? Would fine dining be just as enjoyable if I followed the rule wine or dessert but not both? Is vegging out in front of the TV with a bag of chips really how I want to spend my evenings? Obviously, every one will have different challenges and solutions:
In this strategy for weight loss and wellness à la française, there are no recipes, only ingredients. As with good cooking, the result will depend on what you use and what pleases you. There are some elements that apply to all cases: a little more walking, a little more water, for instance. But otherwise the approach is unapologetically individualist and will depend somewhat on trial and error. The key is to cultivate your own intuition of your offenders and pleasures and adjust each accordingly by degrees that suit you. (Consider it your vote for the Franco-American ideal of individual liberty over the tyrannical regime of one-size diets.) (pp 58, 59)
I think I needed more structure to lose 70 pounds, but for losing 5, this sort of attentiveness seems to be working.
Appeal: French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano is a fun way to explore more mindful eating.
I used this book as the source for new French words in this week’s Wondrous Words Wednesday post. Besides some interesting new phrases, those quotes represent some of what I liked best about this book.
This is my third book for the Books on France 2013 Challenge at Words and Peace, which means I’ve already met my original goal. But I still have a large stack of books on France to choose from so I know I’ll be reading more.
I’ll also link this post to the Dreaming of France meme hosted each Monday at An Accidental Blog.
This is my fifth book for the Foodies Read 2013 Challenge. My original goal was 14 to 18, so I still have a long way to go here.
Check out other Weekend Cooking posts at Beth Fish Reads today.
This sounds like an American diet book packaged as being “French”, but none of the ideas you’ve mentioned here sound French at all. French people don’t eat in between meals, period. They eat a small breakfast of mainly bread, a big, multiple-course meal for lunch, and a smaller dinner. The concept of snacks don’t exist for anyone over school age. The closest they come would be the ‘apéro’, which is pre-dinner drinks and nibbles. And spending a whole weekend eating leek soup? No way. French people will skip meals altogether if they feel they’ve over eaten, but they’ll never deprive themselves by going on crash diets. They love food too much to eat like that. They get a lot of everyday exercise (not necessarily in a gym, but by walking everywhere), and one very unhealthy way that French women keep off the weight is by smoking and taking diet pills, which are very popular here.
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I have often said I am going to write a diet book.
It will be called ELMM
I will be one page long.
Eat Less, Move More.
$20 please.
Congrats on losing 5 lbs. I am probably not the person to give diet advice-as I have never had a weight issue. That said I am very active and have noticed as I age that you have to keep in shape it does not happen. I think that everyone needs to find what works for them. There are the obvious, do not eat sugar, white wheat etc and exercise. I do not think that anyone will ever get fat from eating vegetables (potatoes and anything else that is starchy is excluded). One trick to staying full is remembering that fiber fills. Try to eat lots of fiber. I read this book and enjoyed it however I will never do 48 hours of leek soup. The French have and advantage in that they walk more than we do and their food is not as processed.
Where in France are you going?
We’re taking a garden tour that will start at Versailles and Giverny then move into the Loire Valley. We’ve tacked on four extra days in Paris at the end. Can’t wait!
I need to get attentive and lose those 5 pounds too! It is so easy to let the portions creep up in size!
Great post. I have that book sitting somewhere on one of my shelves next to all of the other Frenchie books. I’m going to check it out! Anyway, congrats on dropping the weight and I hope you have a wonderful trip abroad! I just blogged about wishing I were on a trip to France, bathed in wine, myself.
Interesting. I’ve looked at this book and I think I need more structure (I have a lot to lose) from what you describe. But it seems like a good approach to keeping it off.
Have a wonderful trip to France!
My daughter told me an interesting story just last week. One of her school friends went on a three month exchange to France. She was so excited that she would get to eat real French food. Well, the family that she stayed with didn’t cook, they bought all premade packaged food. Rather icky stuff. She was so upset and it spoiled her experience to eat such poor food. So not all French people eat wonderful food.
I wish they would not always throw all the people of one country together and make them all the same. There are fat French women just as much as there are slim Americans. And there are terrible eaters, just like Heather said, as well as mindful ones.
I’ve been curious about this one, so I’m glad to see your great review. I always lose weight in Europe/UK despite eating whatever I want. I attribute it to all the walking. And I was going to write the same book as Caite!
I lived in France for a while, and there were plenty of overweight French women there and plenty of thin and average women as well. I always thought Mireille Guiliano was a little arrogant in her claim. But I am glad you found what works for you, losing weight is such a individual experience for each person.
I’ve wondered about this book. The approach makes sense, but I really like Judith Beck’s advice that hunger is not an emergency… so sensible! My sister hosted a German exchange student a couple of years ago and she gained 20 pounds while she was here, too.
I think overweight people in France are thought to be that way because they eat like Americans do! It’s true that people within the same country can eat very differently, but it does seem that paying attention to what you’re eating is the basic idea behind eating like a French woman.
I’ve read this book and thought it had some helpful tips — like you said, mostly, being mindful of what you eat. Enjoying it in the moment. I love how you compared the different books and tips they gave. Thanks for playing along today with Dreaming of France too. Here’s my Dreaming of France meme
I was just thinking about this book the other day when I picked up French Kids Eat Everything and the author was talking about the paradox of the French eating and staying so slim. I wonder how much of it boils down to them being more active (LOL to Caite’s book pitch) and eating less processed foods. I’m desperately trying to instill healthy eating habits in my daughter but I find it tough when my husband has terrible eating habits.
I do think it’s important to listen to hunger cues. This is something that I certainly could be more mindful of.
Great post Joy! Congratulations on losing all that weight, it sounds like you have a wonderful trip coming up. I read this book way back whenever it was released, so I don’t really remember too much detail. The notion of 48 hours of leek soup did stick with me- and no, I didn’t do it either. My lingering memory is about portion size.
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