It's how you live, not what you eat, that counts

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It's how you live, not what you eat, that counts

JENNIFER WELLS
Toronto Star

Best lunch Number 1: oysters on the half shell and a glass of champagne
in a sweet restaurant on the journey to Mont-Saint-Michel.

Finest lunch Number 2: a plate of oysters, followed by a second plate
of oysters, accompanied by two glasses of Sancerre at the Oyster Bar in
Grand Central Station.

Well, aren't we the little duchess.

Worst dinner: the two chili cheese dogs consumed this week, followed by
a microwave bag of butter popcorn because, hey, if you're in for two
chilli cheese dogs you might as well go all the way. Oh, eat the whole
lot in front of the television. Go on.

Disconcerting thought: it took less time to eat the tractor-trailer
load of nitrates in a bun than it took to eat the aforementioned
oysters.

There are moments one must hang one's head in shame.

What to do: purchase a copy of French Women Don't Get Fat, the
hot-selling book by Mireille Guiliano who, impressively, knocked it off
in her spare time when she wasn't attending to the affairs of Clicquot
Inc., the champagne company she runs out of New York.

I don't go in for diet books. Never have. Which is not to say I haven't
gone in for dieting. High school. Recall the grapefruit diet, which
consisted of eating grapefruit prior to an almost non-existent
breakfast and an almost non-existent lunch followed by gorging from 4
p.m. to bedtime.

The early career diet. Recall mean lunches of Melba toast and Fresca
followed by lunatic eating from Happy Hour to bedtime.

And so on.

The Scarsdale diet was in there somewhere. Can't remember a thing about
it and except for Jean Harris' assassination of Dr. Tarnower.

Never did Atkins.

I have something of a junk food history.

That's my story. What's yours?

So, anyway, this French Women book has just been released to great
acclaim and, despite my aversion to diet-like literature, I was won
over by the amusingly simple cover illustration of a woman in a French
blue top and saffron pants walking a poodle and pulling along a
shopping buggy with pink tulips, a baguette, and what is surely meant
to be a bottle of Veuve.

That, said I, is the life for me.

Also, the women in Paris are like the women in Tokyo: they are sleek,
beautifully groomed and have fabulous skin.

That, said I, is the look for me. And I hope it comes with Prada shoes.

The great treat in French Women is that it isn't a conventional diet
book. There are no tables, no charts and none of that big screeching
boldface type to encourage you to remember the book's key nostrums.
Like, STOP EATING!

In fact, French Women encourages just the opposite.

Eat. Eat well. Eat slowly.

Appropriately, there is a languor to Guiliano's writing as she recounts
the story of moving from France to the U.S. as an 18-year-old, where
she packed on the pounds. She blames chocolate chip cookies, brownies,
bagels, ice cream and the American habit of either not sitting down to
eat or, alternatively, eating in front of the telly.

I'm not so sure it's fair for Guiliano to blame America for her weight
gain. One of my dear sisters moved to Paris as an au pair at the same
age and gained 20 pounds. Could it have been the cheese? Or possibly
the mille-feuille? Both, of course.

I'm cutting the writer some slack because she has many things to say
that I liked very much. America, she says, "suffers from a gastronomic
class system unknown in France." The elite consume the Earth's
"seasonal best," while the majority of Americans "are conditioned to
demand and accept bland, processed, chemically treated, generally
unnatural foods, which through packaging and marketing have been made
to seem wholesome."

Supermarket aisles filled with boxes of already prepped and stuffed and
chemically enhanced dinners spring to mind. Such fare is sometimes
accompanied by blaring televisions advertising the obvious: the
purchaser merely needs to heat and serve.

Against this we have been fed a never-ending meal of diet fads, or what
Guiliano calls "unsustainable extremism," which practitioners often
pair with extreme exercise. Both habits, says Guiliano, are so not
French.

The author does not advocate sheer sloth ‹ reclining on the divan
licking triple crème from one's fingers.

No.

She advocates walking, walking, walking (at least 30 minutes a day) and
hiking many stairs.

She advocates a glass of wine with dinner, but never wine without food.

Smaller portions.

Fresh ingredients.

Real chocolate ‹ a square or two, the higher the cocoa content the
better.

Unadulterated yogurt. (Forget the sugary low-fat supermarket stuff.)

Lots of water.

Skip the hard liquor.

A light amount of work with three- or five-pound weights.

Sleep.

Stop slouching.

It does no justice to this book to reduce it to a list. It's really
about a state of mind. I'm particularly enamoured of a phrase I had not
heard: Je déprime donc je chocolate. When I'm down, I chocolate.

And of the overall sense of slow.

This movement is not new to me ‹ nor, I know, to you ‹ but Guiliano
offers practical advice to help one "recast" one's approach to food and
well-being. Keeping track of everything you eat for three weeks is the
first thing you need to do. Spending a weekend consuming nothing but
leeks and the broth they expend when boiled is another advisory.

That last part sounds challenging, but Guiliano is doing nothing more
than recounting the advice given to her as a 19-year-old some 40 years
ago.

There is an elitism that surfaces in the book from time to time.
Guiliano orders her hazelnuts from Oregon right after harvest. She
finds that taking a glass of champagne really sets the palate for a
meal. Cooking with champagne is deemed "fun."

And she doesn't have to face the sheer madness of fuelling the furnaces
of any children, let alone teenagers.

But I sense that with planning ‹ there are a number of recipes offered
up ‹ this "recasting" idea makes a whole lot more sense than any of the
faddish diet notions that take root from time to time.

Now, if I could only stop eating at my desk.