French Women Don't Get Fat

Rating:
Summary: It Fits My Style
Review:
Finally someone that doesn't tell us that it is wrong to enjoy food! Most authors in North America seem to always convey the message that the best way to be slim is to hate or despise food. I have always had trouble subscribing to this religion...

It turns out that you CAN lose weight while still loving food, as long as you remember the following commandments:

1. Don't avoid food, love it, you need it to simply stay alive. But if you love it, then savor every bite of it.
2. Eat slowly, chew it well, prolong the time of pleasure. Just by doing that you will eat less.
3. Always use fresh ingredients, don't warm up yesterday's leftovers.
4. Don't give up on fats, or carbs - you need them all. Just use them moderately.
5. Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. Drink a lot of water.
6. Stay away from processed foods; focus on quality, unprocessed, fresh ingredients.
7. Lead an active lifestyle; use your muscles in your everyday life: take the stairs, walk to your grocery shop, or to your barber, etc...
8. Breathe fresh air.
9. Balance your lifestyle, focus on pleasure.
10. Use common sense to stay healthy!

All the above, plus some other valuable advice can also be found in the book "Can We Live 150 Years?" by M. Tombak. Mr. Tombak is another European author that does not subscribe to the idea of food being our curse. He also gives more insight into the notion of "Internal Hygiene". Generally, another good, commonsense approach to health, wellbeing and longevity. Check it out! Many excerpts from the book, and a few free ebooks on similar topics I have found at the website www.starthealthylife.com


Rating:
Summary: French Diet a Smoke Screen?
Review: 30.8% of French women smoke. Almost half of the French women between the ages of 18 and 24 are smokers. Tobacco is an appetite suppressant and cigarette smoking helps women remain thin.

Rating:
Summary: Stop the madness!
Review: After skunking up my house by boiling up leeks and skunking up my breath by actually eating them, I've got to give Mireille Guiliano some credit. She's made a mint selling a lifestyle which really only works in one place--France! Her next project should be selling the Brooklyn Bridge. We don't have lavish outdoor markets here to pick fresh produce, and we don't have lavishly short workdays so that we can be home spending two hours chopping, cleaning and then boiling up vegetables that would be more logically fed to swine. There's no secret to French thinness: Anyone who's actually spent any time in France knows one thing: They're midgets! France is full of people with genes for being short and thin--perhaps it helped them dodge the guillotine. A few hour's drive and you're in Germany, where millions of us have roots, and what do you see: Big, tall, beefy -- fat people. That said, Guiliano's a good writer, and we could all stand to eat more veggies and less Olive Garden swill. But instead of buying this book, you'd be better off saving up for a ticket to Paris instead.

Rating:
Summary: Hey, if you need to call it French to follow the advice, OK
Review: Eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Avoid packaged foods and processed foods. Walk. Take you time while eating. Drink more water. Sounds like common sense to me. Why it has to be packaged in a faux-European package is beyond me, but if that's what it takes to get people to get out of the drive-thru lane at the local fast food restaurant...ok. Guiliano isn't breaking new ground with this book. All she's doing is dressing up and adding a little flair to what nutritionists have been trying to drill into our heads forever. It's really just a glorified cookbook colored with pretty phrases and a sly "gossipy" attitude that will appeal to women who want to be trendy and healthy. Her advice is sound, but not new. But if it helps somebody's self esteem to use this book as a guide to getting down to a healthy weight, than it's OK with me. If you want to lose weight and don't know how, but are afraid to have your girlfriends see Weight Watcher literature in your car, get this for a coffee table book and and throw in a few french phrases. Instead of having a weight problem, you can latch onto the new in vogue attitude to food that will make your friends jealous.

Rating:
Summary: But the Sadness Is The Quantities Allowed
Review: French Women Don't Get Fat, but American men who can't stand the French do! This is a quaint book that means well despite not realizing that Frenchies and Americans are two totally different cultures. Sit in your un-ACed house, walk to work, do little for 35 hours a week, drink wine and eat baguettes all the time, and you will be thin, too! But the Dipper Den has a honking big Friedrich AC in every room, yet another Kia in the driveway with a full tank of Texas dinosaur juice, a 40+ hour week selling mining equipment parts, a love for high gravity porter and stout, and a hankering for Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese and beef jerky! And you know what? I'M HAPPY!!! Viva los yanquis!!!! Buy this to fill big spaces on your bookshelf!

Rating:
Summary: Yet Another Failure for the Behemoth
Review: I spent quite a bit of time with some elegant (albeit hairy and smelly) French ladies during my floating phase back in the glorious '70s. The gals were slim and were rather fond of eating for pleasure. A steady diet of Young Hops kept those darling putains Scarlett O'hara thin. There is no mention of the Hopperoo diet in this book.

There is a lot of advice on enjoying what you eat (here! here!) and repetetive pourparlers about how the clever and capon Frenchies avoid obesity. I suspect some of this is all the running away that they do, but this is also neglected in Guiliano's otherwise wonderful book.

Nevertheless, I purchased this philisophical/diet book for my baboonish bride Bessie in a desperate attempt to help her lose some of her excess tonnage or at the very least, enjoy the eating while she's not losing it. Well, you guessed it: Failure number 371. She's bigger than ever and has stopped shaving her armpits. Another losing effort for your truly. But some pleasant memories of my French fugue. A worthy attempt, but unable to do the impossible.

Rating:
Summary: From someone who lives in France...
Review: Ironically, this book is not published in France (at least not yet), now I wonder why ? Talk about cliché, it sounds like this woman left France in the 1950's and never came back since. I can guarantee you that no more women in this country spend week ends eating leek soup than anywhere else in the world and there is plenty of fast food being consumed here. Though there are perhaps a few less overweight people here than in some other countries, there are still plenty of them and the number is steadily growing. And I certainly wouldn't describe french diet as an ideal to aim at.
One thing that IS UNMISTAKABLY french is the author's ARROGANCE about the superiority of everything french.




Rating:
Summary: Nothing New Here-but don't shot the messenger
Review: There is nothing new in this book-the author cites the usual use of fruits, vegetables, taking your time eating, drinking water and exercising as ways that the French stay slim. She also annoying names all the exotic types of fruits and vegetables (including 4-5 types of plums) available fresh to her at the Paris outdoor market. Just try finding some of those things at your local supermarket! If I was the CEO of a champagne firm and lived in NYC and Paris, I could do my shopping at some of those markets, too. I did find her voice and accent very pleasant to listen to, but that was about it.

Rating:
Summary: A Human Approach to Eating, Finally!
Review: To read Ms. Guiliano's book was a relief. I never found myself, nor my personality able to fit in with any new diet or exercise trend. My motto was "enjoy life." Usually that motto included food and avoided excercise. This approach to life made me feel guilty. I was never obese. At most I was 20 pounds overweight ( and that for a little while). Yet I felt that to lose those extra pounds I would have to drastically change my lifestyle and become someone I did not want to be. French Women Don't Get Fat validated my sense of self in relation to food and exercise. I can be "normal." Normal meaning that I don't have to banish carbs from my life or exercise and weight-train hours a day. I can lead a normal life and enjoy foods (including butter, sugar, and desert!).

People have been eating these things for centuries and have not had obesity issues--until now. Ms. Guiliano takes us back to the roots and basics of eating for nutrition and pleasure; and shows us how this is a healthy, enjoyable, and proper way of living. Extreme diets and extreme exercise are counters to our new way of food consumption: big, fast, and processed.

Thank you Mireille Guiliano for reminding me that it's OK to enjoy food and it's OK to indulge (from time to time). Never will I feel guilty about my morning croissant again.

Rating:
Summary: French bad!
Review: What?! How dare the author suggest that we follow anything the French have done?!

As we all know, the French are a devious people who are out to get the USA. Their vicious stance in the UN, opposing our freedom to do whatever we want, is unacceptable.

Now the author suggests that we eat leek soup and drop the Big Macs? Intolerable.

The author may be suggesting that the French have developed a unique gene that prevents fatness. However, she is unaware that we've developed a gene in America to prevent thinking, which we plan to export to the planet.

She should get in her Renault and leave the USA at once!