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

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

by Mireille Guiliano

Chatto & Windus $186

In terms of style, Mireille Guiliano is Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. 'Until now,' she writes, 'I humbly submit, one glorious triumph has remained largely unacknowledged, yet it's a basic and familiar anthropological truth: French women don't get fat. I am no physician, physiologist, psychologist, nutritionist, or any manner of 'ist' who helps or studies people professionally. I was, however, born and raised in France, and with two good eyes I've been observing the French for a lifetime. Plus I eat a lot.'

That is putting it mildly. President and chief executive of Clicquot in New York and a director of Champagne Veuve Clicquot in Reims, she eats in restaurants more than 300 times a year ('tough job, I know, but someone has to do it'). This has been her life for 20 years, and always with a glass of wine or champagne at her side. These meals are full: no single course of salad and sparkling water for Guiliano. And yet, unlike 65 per cent of Americans - and like 69 per cent of her countrymen - she's not overweight or unhealthy.

Her secret? 'French women', she writes on page four, 'have a system, their trucs - a collection of well-honed tricks.' She derides the religious extremism of dieting ('the unstated principle seems to be, if you bore yourself to death with one kind of food group, eventually you'll lose interest in eating altogether and the pounds will come off'), preferring to focus on a simple ideology: tout est question d'equilibre (everything in moderation).

Guiliano also suggests that instead of multi-tasking - lunch at the monitor, dinner in front of the TV - one should learn to take pleasure in the planning, preparation and consumption of a meal. In matters gastronomic, act European.