French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano

Somehow, though, these sensible stratagems are more palatable coming from Guiliano, who was once fat herself, and who now happily lives in America, where she first fell victim to our bad habits. You don't have to deprive yourself if you learn to make trade-offs. Slowly changing your eating habits is far more effective than any crash diet.

Keep a food diary and cut out the processed junk. Do some aerobic exercise if you're over 40, lift weights. It is exactly the advice I got last year at Dallas's Cooper Clinic during my annual physical: if you want a glass of wine with dinner, don't eat the bread or skip the baked potato. Miracle's plan as the French way, but it is not unlike the advice that American nutritionists on Web sites and at spas and clinics across the country dispense every day. Most remarkably, despite the fact that she dines out 300 times a year and enjoys two- and three-course meals for lunch and dinner every day - always accompanied by a glass of Champagne - she has remained thin. and a director of Champagne Veuve Clicquot. She learns to love walking, finds her 'equilibrium' and goes on to become C.E.O. Miracle.' He detoxes her with leek broth for a weekend, teaches her to become a master of both her 'willpower' and her 'pleasures,' and supplies her with recipes, including one for apple tart without the dough. After a few miserable months during which she gains more weight, cries herself to sleep and hurries past mirrors clothed in shapeless flannel shifts, her mother brings in the family doctor, a k a 'Dr.

Never fear - Guiliano's story has a happy ending. 'And to this day the sting has not been topped.' 'I could not have imagined anything more hurtful,' she writes. When her own parents met her ocean liner in Le Havre, they were as stunned as mine were, but for a different reason - her father told her she looked like a sack of potatoes. As an 18-year-old from a small town in eastern France, she spent a year as an exchange student in the well-to-do Boston suburb of Weston, Mass., where she discovered the distinctly American joys of bagels, brownies and chocolate chip cookies and gained 20 pounds. Mireille Guiliano had quite a different teenage experience abroad. It turns out I'd lost 10 pounds - I'm not sure I've looked as good since. But when I stepped off the plane, the jaws of my waiting parents and my best friend literally dropped. Already weight-obsessed, I was sure I'd put on at least 10 pounds.

On weekends we toured the country by train, fortified by bread and (real!) cheese, along with copious amounts of cheap red wine. On weekdays, my fellow American students and I ate lunch in the school cafeteria and discovered the wonders of braised rabbit and coq au vin, followed always by an apricot tart or napoleon (my first ever!) at the nearby patisserie. When I was 15, I studied in France, at the University of Strasbourg, for six weeks. FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT By Mireille Guiliano.

French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano