I find to my great surprise that I’ve never done a post about French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Giuliano. (The link is to her website. She’s wearing a very odd outfit in the current main picture on the home page, but, as she would say, c’est la vie!) While we were on vacation I found myself thinking about that book’s ideas quite a bit as I tried very hard, and for the most part succeeded, in following them.
Here’s her main principle: Eat food you love and eat deliberately and mindfully. Eat real meals. Don’t eat standing up, or in the car, or in front of the TV. Remember that you get the most enjoyment out of the first few bites. You don’t have to eat a lot of something delicious in order to enjoy it; in fact, overeating destroys the enjoyment. Better to have a small portion and enjoy every morsel than to scarf down a huge serving without tasting it much and then paying the price of feeling bloated and stuffed.
Vacations can be very challenging in this area, as eating tends to be part of the appeal of the trip. There can be a lot of what I call “recreational eating.” You’re sightseeing, or driving, or just walking down an unfamiliar street, and there’s an ice cream stand, or a dessert place, or a pizza place selling slices. If you’re in a group people get hungry at different times, and it’s usually the one who’s hungry who calls the shots. Because you’re on a totally different schedule it can be difficult to keep track of how much you’re eating, and when you’re eating, and when you’re going to eat. So everyone gets ice cream, even though dinner is only an hour away. Hey, we’re on vacation! Let’s indulge! There’s an entertainment factor to everything, and so what if we just had lunch? Peer pressure can be a factor here too. “Aren’t you going to get anything? Why not?”
Well, I’m here to tell you that I had a great time eating on this trip, with shrimp and grits playing a role in at least a couple of meals. I had a bowl of delicious she-crab soup at a lovely restaurant outside of Charleston. I had some great salads. And I got a hearty breakfast every morning for free at our hotel. They had scrambled eggs and some kind of meat every single morning, so that’s what I ate while we were there.
There were a couple of times when I didn’t make wise choices, and I pass them on for whatever help they might be. I never seem to remember that getting the lunch or dinner “special” at a Chinese restaurant usually results in way too much food, and when you’re not at home it can be hard to save leftovers. Plus they’re never as good the second time around, although I do make a good-faith effort to eat them up if I can. I’m afraid that my order of takeout kung pao chicken largely went to waste, and I hate waste. But it was just too much. I didn’t need to order an entire meal at the family seafood restaurant we visited on the road, and, most important of all, I didn’t need to eat frozen custard more than once at Goodberry’s, a legendary place in North Carolina. I had decided that I’d indulge in one small concrete there, so our first night I got my signature chocolate malt (extra malt, please) with toasted almonds version. Great. But then everyone wanted to go the next night, too. And the flavor of the day was peanut butter! So I got another one. But you know what? I didn’t enjoy the second one nearly as much. At least I abstained when the guys wanted to stop yet a third time, right before we went to the airport. When I think that two and a half years ago when we went to NC for Thanksgiving I insisted on going to Goodberry’s four times! I don’t even remember what I got. It wasn’t worth it.
On the whole, though, I was pretty pleased with my food choices on the trip. One tip that I find very useful any time I’m eating out is to order an appetizer for my entree.(But be sure that it’s not one of those made-to-share things.) Tell the server that you want it as your main course so they don’t bring it out before they bring everyone else’s meal and you end up eating by yourself and then watching everyone else eat. We ended up at this rather swanky restaurant one evening after an abortive attempt to visit the beach. We were tired and bedraggled, and it was pretty late. They couldn’t have been nicer, though. I didn’t want a big meal and so just got their crab cake appetizer, and it was delicious and just enough. Don’t worry about not ordering something inexpensive. If you really feel bad for the server you can always tip according to what a regular meal costs. (I say that as someone who spent a few weeks one summer as a waitress.) And don’t eat any bread or chips until they bring the meal. That’s another French Woman idea. (I don’t think she ever eats at restaurants that serve chips, though.) They bring out that bread basket, or chips basket, and everyone digs in, and then the gargantuan meals arrive, and everyone eats that, too. It can be hard to ignore that basket when you’re hungry, but you’ll enjoy your meal much more if you don’t indulge.
If you decide to read Mireille’s book, by the way, you can safely ignore her awful advice about the leek soup. Truly terrible. And some of her recipes are just plain weird. The women on By the Book, the podcast I’ve mentioned before even though I don’t necessarily recommend it (hmmm) tried following FWDGF back awhile ago and were less than impressed. They hated the leek soup, didn’t want to eat breakfast, and seemed to have this weird idea that Mireille says that your different foods shouldn’t touch each other on the plate, which is just not true. I don’t know where they got that, as I sure don’t remember it. Their idea, by the way, of taking a self-help book and following it to the letter, is almost surely doomed to fail. There’s never going to be a set of guidelines that fits every person totally.
The important takeaway from my trip, and from Mireille’s book, is to stop thinking of food as the enemy. Stop thinking of it as an automatic temptation. Instead, enjoy it in a way that makes you feel in control. It was great to step on the scales the morning after we got back and see that I weighed about the same as I had when we left. I have some great food memories and very few regrets.
How about you? Do you have a set of food strategies and guidelines, or do you let the occasion, people and availability dictate how you eat?