French Women Don’t Get Fat

By Mireille Guiliano
Vintage Books

I had wanted to read French Women Don’t Get Fat for a long time. After all, from what I had heard, it is all about how you can eat chocolate, pastries, and bread while losing weight. I don’t know about you ladies out there, but it sounded like a no-brainer to me.

The book turned out to be what I expected it to be, which is full of common sense ideas that most people already know, but don’t actually implement until a book tells them to. For example, Guiliano advises people to enjoy the aforementioned foods, along with plenty of others, in moderation. (Why didn’t I think of that?) That’s not all, though. The latest edition (which is the one I read) contains tons of useful recipes for tasty, but light foods. Guiliano’s aim is not to encourage “light” eating in the fat-free or low-cal sense - she asserts that French women would never eat that stuff – but in enjoying natural, good food like fruits, vegetables, nuts, even wine.

What made this book really enjoyable was Guiliano’s integration of advice with personal experience, almost memoir. She talks about how she gained weight while studying in America, and about the traumatic experience of returning to France and being greeted by her father, who took one look at her and said, “You look like a sack of potatoes.” (Guiliano defends her father, saying that he didn’t mean it and was only taken off guard, but a feminist reader like myself found the exchange cruel and unnecessary.) She also talks about all of the sensory experiences she has had with food – picking berries with her siblings as a child, the French woman’s market shopping experience (and not in a supermarket!), and her mother’s habits of enjoying small amounts of chocolate with eyes closed, as if she were in ecstasy. These stories make the book a much easier read than your typical diet book.

There is plenty of good advice I will take from the book, though there are also things I did not find useful. I will not likely be subjecting myself to a weekend of nothing but “magical leek soup” anytime soon. (This is Guiliano’s suggestion for starting off – a fast of sorts.) She also advises removing all tempting foods for three months, then slowly reintroducing them in moderation. (She acknowledges that if you can’t do this, you should reduce them drastically, which seems more practical to me and has worked in my experience.) But logical arguments like, “You wouldn’t need to work so hard in the gym if you would stop taking elevators and driving everywhere,” are definitely useful, and French Women Don’t Get Fat was a good refresher for such as these.

Review by April D. Boland

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French Women Don't Get Fat