French dieting tips for wealthy, idle Americans

Dining in a foreign country -- watching what locals relish, trying new things -- is fundamental to travel. It can be the whole reason for making a trip to places where the food is good.

Beckoned by the foie gras, mille-feuille, blanquette de veau, I moved to Paris about a year ago. I wanted to indulge, of course, but also to figure out how French people eat such fattening concoctions and still don’t get fat. Long obsessed by my weight, I would be the guinea pig who finally solved the “French paradox.”

Originally, that referred to the high consumption of wine and the relatively low rate of heart disease in France (about 30% of that in America), an apparent contradiction. Gradually, though, the French paradox has come to refer to a bigger nutritional puzzle, the relative slimness of the French, given their diet. About 9% of French men and 11% of French women can be considered obese, compared with 19.5% of American men and 25% of American women.

So I was colossally annoyed to read “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” a new bestselling book by Mireille Guiliano. It’s exactly the book I wanted to write once I cracked the French paradox.

Call it sour grapes, which, Guiliano, the Martha Stewart of dieting, would undoubtedly turn into some exquisitely satisfying low-calorie dessert.

Recently, I had lunch in Paris with two American women, longtime ex-pats. Leafing through “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” we howled with derision at such passages as this: “French women simply do not suffer the terror of kilos that afflicts so many of their American sisters.... [They] take pleasure in staying thin by eating well.... It’s all a matter of learning the most basic of French rules: Fool yourself.”

I got more annoyed at home when I read the book cover to cover. The trouble is that, like the insufferably superior big sister in a little sister’s nightmare, the author is mostly right.

Guiliano was born in France but went to Massachusetts as an exchange student in the ‘60s, where she gained 20 pounds on brownies and chocolate chip cookies. When she returned home, her alarmed father said she looked like a sack of potatoes. With the help of a family physician, Guiliano shed her flab.

Later, she married an American and took a job with the U.S. branch of Veuve Clicquot Champagne company and now divides her time between Paris and New York.

Given her bicultural experience, she would seem the right person to tell yo-yo American dieters how to resolve the French paradox by eating slowly and for pleasure; seeking balance while making every meal a sacred rite; getting satisfaction from such esoteric fare as oysters; limiting oneself to small portions of favorite foods (because deprivation breeds discontent); and, of course, refusing seconds and between-meal snacks.

The best things about Guiliano’s book are the personal dieting tips -- soup for dinner five times a week; monitoring weight by the feel of your clothes, not the depressing readings of a scale -- and luscious-sounding, low-calorie, French family recipes she passes along. She makes these fun to read with vignettes from her youth, such as the tree-climbing antics of her girlfriends at annual cherry-picking parties.

The problem, obviously, is that few of us have backyard cherry trees to fondly remember and from which to harvest the ingredients for season-appropriate, wholly satisfying, low-calorie desserts, such as her nurturing mother’s cherry-juice-soaked baba au rhum.

Certainly, we have cloth napkins and silverware but no time to use them as Guiliano advises.

We’d like to amble with her around open-air markets and make fresh vegetable soup every week.

We wouldn’t mind shedding 10 pounds, buying lacy undergarments without intimidation and, in general, looking like those sexy Frenchwomen in the movies.

“Please, get real, Madame Guiliano!” one wants to cry out. “Do you understand anything about American life outside the chichi restaurants and epicurean food markets of New York?”

The ugly truth is that achieving weight equilibrium is largely a question of income, education and class. In America and France, people with resources can afford a variety of weight maintenance options, including health clubs, diet programs and books like Guiliano’s.

Meanwhile, obesity -- engendered by low-cost, high-calorie, nutritionally empty beverages and foods and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle -- is reaching epidemic proportions in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization.

Guiliano offers a compelling approach to lifelong slimness for upper-income women, but she has nothing to offer the vast majority of overweight and obese people who don’t have the time or money to follow her advice. Life is just too complicated these days. Telling people they can lose weight by shopping daily for fresh foods, cooking at home, setting a pretty table and lingering over meals is like urging Stone Age hunters to eat only roots and berries.

Besides, the longer I live in France, the more I feel sure the slenderizing effects of the French paradox have mostly to do with peer pressure and cigarettes.

Of course, I’m going to try Guiliano’s weight-loss plan, which starts with a weekend-long purge on watery leek soup, a prescription as drastic and un-Gallic as any of the extreme fad diets she chastises. But I’ll have to hole up in my Paris apartment, where the temptations of patisseries and cheese shops can’t get to me. And, believe me, I’m not going to like it.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com /susanspano.