I have posted about Mireille Giuliano before, notably in reviewing her first book, French Women Don’t Get Fat. I truly love that book and re-read it periodically. To me, it’s a sound, common-sense set of principles for getting and staying slim no matter what your nationality, and I ignore the ideas that are just kind of silly. Sorry, Mireille, but very few people who live in America visit France often enough to buy their prunes there. (Of course, that’s assuming that you buy them at all . . . ) And we don’t go mushroom hunting much around here. Nor do we have blueberry bushes in the back yard to supply us with those little nutritional powerhouses. Nor do we divide our time between New York City and Provence, where there are excellent farmers’ markets year-round. (I always wonder whether or not Mireille ever goes into a regular supermarket. Probably not!) I ran into an interesting article in the UK newspaper The Guardian (but now I can’t find it) in which some Frenchwomen were interviewed about how they view their weight, and they said that Mireille’s book was a big, fat (sorry) pain in the neck because it perpetrated the myth of always-thin French women. But, and this is a very important but, those interviewees weren’t really following the FWDGF principles. Instead, they were making a practice of overindulging at restaurants, because it’s supposedly frowned upon not to eat a lot when you’re out on the town, and then starving themselves the rest of the time. Not, not, not what Mireille says to do! She would say, in her charming French accent, “Who cares what’s considered cool or not cool? You eat the way you want to, and if people don’t like it, tant pis!” (Or, as my mother used to say, “If they don’t like it, they can lump it!”) So there it is.

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