French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure

Making choices that are meaningful to you is the essence of the French woman's secret.

We can't imagine anything more boring than to live with someone who doesn't care about food or eating or sharing meals.

Learn to say no, with an eye to saying yes to something else.

Expose them {your kids} to the widest variety of vegetables and fruits, showing them how good things can be in season. Tasteless fruits and vegetables won't win them over for life.

~....value simplicity in all things, never serve any aperitif but Champagne. Hard liguor requires a bar, special paraphernalia, and a variety of glasses, as well as messy shaking or stirring. More important, it numbs more than it tickles the taste buds. When you've spent time and money preparing delicious food for your guests, the last thing you want is to render them unable to taste it. That will eliminate one of the most important topics of conversation!~

French women typically think about good things to eat. American women typically worry about bad things to eat.

~There are no recipes, only ingredients~

French women love bread and would never consider a life without carbs.

French women eat and serve what's in season, for maximum flavor and value, and know availability does not equal quality.

A meal that can be packed and frozen and thawed is nothing you should desire--much less teach your kids to want.

You owe it to your loved ones as well as yourself to know and pursue your pleasures.

French women know one can go far with a great haircut, a bottle of champagne, and a divine perfume.

For this reason, three months is the usual time to find your way. But you must enjoy the ride.

The real reason French women don't get fat is not genetic, but cultural, and if the French subjected themselves to the American extremes of eating and dieting, the obesity problem in France would be much worse than what has struck America.

If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living.

Developing a program that will serve you a lifetime is not an instant fix. Attitude shifts take much longer, but when they take, they tend to take for good.

Gastronomic boredom leads to lots of unhealthy eating. If you don’t make improvisation and experimentation part of your eating life, you are sure to find yourself in an eating rut.

On the whole, “offenders” are foods we tend to eat compulsively, with less actual pleasure than you might think. Often they are poor versions of something better.

Any program that your mind interprets as punishment is one your mind is bound to rebel against.

I offer the wisdom of the great American gastronome M.F.K. Fisher, who in The Art of Eating wrote, “No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.

Making choices that are meaningful to you is the essence of the French woman’s secret.

Don't let a busy life or electronic communication gadgets be your excuse for excess solitude - it's a talent, but a rare one, to make yourself laugh.

For many, the twenties seem like the time of infinite possibility, although in retrospect a woman will almost always idealize her thirties.

Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is a book all French people know well. It can be read in an hour but is packed with timeless wisdom.

Tout est question d’équilibre (Everything is a matter of balance):

As the French know well, ritual is how we give meaning to different aspects of being alive, including the most elemental: birth, marriage, death, and through it all, until the end, eating.

you must understand there is nothing noble in failing to discover and cultivate your pleasures. (It will make you not only fat, but grouchy.)