FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT
Reaching and maintaining equilibrium is not done by force of heredity; it’s something we cultivate through the way we live. Genetics plays a part, of course, and balance certainly does seem easier for some. But looks can be deceiving; some may actually mask unhealthy habits. Consider the proverbial model who eats nothing but burgers and pizza yet doesn’t gain an ounce. Genetics may be protecting her insides — for now — from this assault (if not from our envious glares). But just as likely, such a woman may in fact be less well than one who must pay much more attention to what she consumes, how much she moves, and so forth. Genetic predisposition to slenderness is not, as I have said, disproportionately distributed among French women. Most who appear to live in healthy balance are actually working at it. But that work has been made infinitely easier by wise cultural conditioning and practice.
Unfortunately for all women—see under “Life, unfairness of” — the equilibrium we work to achieve shifts as we age. If we don’t continue paying close attention to our bodies, our healthy balance will be pulled out from under us. But despair not: attention and incremental adjustment throughout life are easier than big corrections following long intervals of imbalance. Alertness and rapid response can allow us to enjoy a long life of pleasures while never getting fat.
Still, it does happen. We can be eating well and staying active for years when, bang!—force majeure. This is true for all humans, but especially for women, whose weight and silhouette can be radically altered by three major physiological and psychological events, in which hormones run amuck: adolescence, pregnancy, and menopause. All three present a serious potential for troublesome weight gain, and it’s better to plan for them than to eat first and ask questions later.
But let’s begin at the beginning.
BIRTH TO AGE SEVEN
While this could hardly be mistaken for a child-care book, common sense tells us that habits acquired young are the hardest to break. Take advantage of the last moment when you have complete control over what your child consumes. As children we develop our lifelong sense of what is natural and comforting, and the adult continues to seek comfort from the same sources, regardless of how unhealthful. You needn’t read the complete Proust to figure this out. The best gift you can give a child is a conditioned attraction to the things that are good for her. First and foremost, this means water.
Beware of dehydration among infants. The critical period is the first two years, especially the first six months. A baby’s body is 65 to 80 percent water (versus 60 percent for an adult). Without plenty of water, a baby, especially one kept too warm, can dehydrate in as little as three hours, a problem only exacerbated by the common infant problems of vomiting and diarrhea. When a baby refuses to drink, sleeps too much, is sluggish, has a gray complexion, or breathes too fast, it’s time to get oral rehydration salts at the pharmacy. Don’t let things get that far. Make sure your infant is well hydrated. Baby food is usually rich in water, but the taste for water by itself won’t develop naturally if you limit a baby’s liquids to juice and milk. (Perhaps the questionable preference for caloric liquids over water starts here.)
Eating well is something that needs to be taught early, but as everyone knows, a baby’s palate is no more well developed than its teeth. Don’t try to start too early with intense flavors and turn your baby off. By the time a child is three years old, however, French mothers start cultivating good taste.
Especially in the Western world, children have many noxious eating temptations, foods chemically treated to trick our evolutionary programming into believing they are good eats. You may need to fight fire with fire, fooling kids, as I was fooled, into eating what is good until they can appreciate for themselves. Americans seem less inclined to do this than they were fifty years ago; they seem to believe any form of deceit in child rearing will lead to trauma. This is nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with fooling kids into learning which foods are good and which are not to be abused. Take time to develop some games that make this easier. When I was a girl, my father would come home for lunch (as most workers and schoolchildren did in those days) and we would play pèle la pomme — peel the apple. My mother didn’t like the skins, so my father was assigned the peeling, which we watched him do with wonderful dexterity as we spoke about the morning’s goings-on.
Nutrition should be taught at school, but too often it is not, and by then it can be harder to change habits ingrained by supermarkets and fast-food chains and virtually everything on television — mostly they are selling not healthy eating, but products supposed to be edible, a term I use advisedly. Few are selling naturally good food. I was amazed as an exchange student in Weston, Massachusetts, to discover frozen dinners. Now many of them even carry claims of being “healthy options.” A meal that can be packed and frozen and thawed is nothing you should desire — much less teach your kids to want.
In France, where globalization has only started to precipitate a previously unimaginable obesity wave among small kids, a nationwide school program of nutritional awareness has been implemented (big government has its uses). It also helps that there is not nearly as much variety on television and TV plays a much smaller role in the average French child’s life, sparing her the roughly ten thousand food ads the average American child sees annually. Food on television makes one think about eating and gets one’s gastric juices flowing, triggering the release of insulin, lowering one’s blood sugar, and stimulating food cravings. It’s gastronomic pornography.
Here are some basic rules your kids will thank you for when they become adults who aren’t fat:
• Get your children used to drinking water straight (not juice or “fruitlike” drinks or soda) as their thirst quencher. As in adults, thirst is a faulty indicator of proper hydration, kicking in only when the tank is way too low. Kids should learn to pay attention to their urine. If it’s not pale and clear, more water is needed.
• Now is the time to learn the meaning of three meals a day and sensible portions—a hungry child’s eyes can be bigger than her stomach, as we say. Some kids just can’t bear food in the morning, but the French agree with most experts that classroom attention and learning are markedly improved by a real breakfast. Making sure your kids eat at regular intervals will reduce the menace of snacking, which usually means junk to kids left to their own devices.
• Teach your children the rituals of civilized eating by setting a good example. Don’t eat in front of the TV if you don’t want them to. Dinner is a ritual; table conversation is an art — even if it amounts to playing mange ta soupe as our nounou, Yvette, did.
• Expose them to the widest variety of vegetables and fruits, showing them how good things can be in season. Tasteless fruits and vegetables won’t win them over for life.
• Learn to use treats. There is nothing wrong with the old custom of rewarding good eating, whether in adults or in children. But never use junk as a reward. And try to instill low-sugar tolerance. A dessert doesn’t have to be supersweet to be a treat. Try a tarte aux fruits. Most kids’ cereals have more sugar than a French pastry; avoid them like the plague. (I wonder how many children on behavior-modifying pharmaceuticals are merely sugar junkies.)
• Don’t stock bad foods out of convenience. But always have something to snack on. Kids love tangerines, grapes. Did you know raw fennel makes a great snack food?
• Get them involved in food preparation—looking, smelling, and tasting ingredients: what you’re doing in the kitchen shouldn’t be a mystery to them. Take them to food markets, gardens, and farms where they can pick fruit.
• Don’t be a permissive parent. Fear that their kids won’t like them has terrorized lots of Americans. The French are more traditional in child rearing and accept that children benefit from structure and strictures.
• Get your kids moving. Apart from those committed to sports lessons and teams, exertion for many American kids has been reduced to the virtual kind of the Playstation, fine for hand-eye coordination but no substitute for the real thing. Kids have much more energy than adults; without proper outlets, emotional problems, including overeating, can result. In Europe, you see kids playing outside till dinner — as they used to in America in the days before the obesity epidemic.
• Remember: children imitate their parents, so practice good manners and habits for wellness. Also remember that prevention in all things starts in childhood.
AGES SEVEN TO SEVENTEEN
Above all, getting enough calcium is critical during this period, when 40 to 50 percent of the definitive bone capital is constituted. Be on the alert — many girls avoid dairy products because they view them as fattening. This is a big mistake. Yogurt and cheese should be eaten regularly. Now is also the time when girls learn their taste for coffee and sodas, sugar and caffeine, so encourage moderation.
A few more “rules” and suggestions for the formative years, when weight may become an issue for the first time in our lives:
• Some teenage girls are drawn to vegetarianism nowadays, which has both advantages and liabilities. It’s not to be discouraged, as long as proteins, especially dairy, are consumed. But if your kids are carnivores, like most French children, it’s a good time to establish the principle that one should have meat only two to three times a week. Teach them the pleasures of seafood in various forms. Nowadays some kids love sushi, which wasn’t an option when I was growing up.
• Start teaching them how to cook simple dishes, the sooner the better. Connection to preparing one’s food is the French woman’s lifeline to healthy eating. So is cleaning up.
• Movement. Don’t trust school athletic programs as the only source of exertion. Half the gym class can be wasted suiting up and taking attendance. If your kid is an athlete, that’s great; but if not, sitting around until dinner is not an option. Chores, volunteer work, and many other activities build character and burn calories. Don’t run a hotel for your kids; make sure they pick up after themselves.
• Now is the time to grow up respecting our liquid assets. Eight to ten glasses of water a day may be an easier sell when you explain the benefits in weight control and keeping the complexion clear. They’ll need even more if they sneak salty snack foods. I also recommend that parents be the first to serve alcohol (preferably in the form of wine and water) to kids and teach them respectful use. This is not something they should be prowling around to obtain behind your back.
In general, bodies still developing need to eat a bit of everything. For perfect nutrition, children and teenagers should really be having about twenty different foods a day. Well, we must do what we can. If there is difficulty with meat or fish, there are plenty of ways to “fool” the wary youngster, from rolling prunes in veal or turkey scaloppine to hiding veggies in an omelet and serving fish dipped in an egg batter and cooked in a nonstick pan. Barter once in a while. On Wednesdays, my parents often served biftek de cheval (horse steak), which I loathed mostly for sentimental reasons, though the meat is actually quite tasty. It was always followed with a small surprise dessert. So I ate my horse.
The increase in body fat that accompanies adolescence generally falls in the middle of the seven-to-seventeen period. It’s time for every young woman, French or otherwise, to get some counsel from a family doctor or even a gynecologist. Professionals can confirm with more credibility that a bit of weight gain is natural and healthy. Proper menstrual function depends on fat reserves. In thin girls, puberty is often delayed; in not-so-thin girls, it can be precocious. But if weight problems do occur, the most important countermeasure is the three-meals-a-day system. There is no surer ballast for physical and mental well-being at this time. Girls who have had the golden rules of proper nutrition programmed into them will be better able to fend for themselves when they leave the nest.
AGES SEVENTEEN TO THIRTY-FIVE
For many, the twenties seem like the time of infinite possibility, although in retrospect a woman will always idealize her thirties. Late teens and early twenties are inevitably a tough transition, as they were for me: college, starting a career, even a family. This great stress comes just as we have already exhausted everyone’s patience with teenage angst. I’ve met countless women in their twenties suffering weight problems because of not yet having grown into adult habits of eating, drinking, and moving. It’s particularly painful to see them suckered by unsustainable diets — to which faith in technology, common in today’s youth, appears to make them especially vulnerable. A little fuzzy science is a dangerous thing. They also tend to want results timed to social events, of which there are many for the predominantly single demographic. So the idea of ten pounds in two weeks is extremely seductive. Making matters worse, most haven’t learned anything about cooking. If this is you, I recommend the French woman’s Full Monty: a month of nutritional inventory, Magical Leek Soup, short- and long-term recasting. Now is the time to get serious about putting away childish things.
The freedom most enjoy during the seventeen-to-thirty-five period can also invite seemingly grown-up excesses: rich meals out (for business and adult courtship rituals) and especially excess alcohol consumption among the freshly legal and unsupervised. For this demographic, most overeating occurs after eight p.m., when you should be most en garde. It’s important to develop hunger pacifiers for the times leading up to lunch and dinner and the twilight zone before bed.
Muscle mass and bone density should be at their peak. Ironically, though, now is the time when most of us fall into a destructive sedentary lifestyle, fostered by the fact that more and more jobs require us to sit at a desk all day for the first time in our lives. The habits of movement, the principle of faire les cent pas, can be a help here, though the girl in us still wants to blast away her sins in StairMaster marathons. Eventually this gets too boring or exhausting, and the roof caves in on her precarious equilibrium. The sooner you learn the French woman’s incremental approach, the easier and more pleasurable will be the rest of your life. Try to transform exercise time into entertainment; look for activities and exertions that amuse you, especially if you can do them with friends. There are a thousand stops on the road from triathlete to couch potato. It is an absolute must to start walking at least thirty minutes a day during these years. Swimming and yoga are also wonderful if you have the inclination. But in any case, you must not let attention to muscle tone and flexibility go until the next stage, when they will be much harder to recover. Ditto metabolism, which naturally declines beginning as early as twenty-five!
For pregnant women, fat accumulation is natural and tends to occur mainly in the first months to build the body’s reserves for breast-feeding. The risk of postpartum weight problems is much greater if you are slightly overweight before you become pregnant. So before you start managing an equilibrium for two, it’s a good idea to get your own in order. Don’t fall back on inevitability theory: “What’s the use? In three months I’ll be big as a house anyway.”
Breast-feeding is good for the baby, but it’s also good for the mother, putting the fat reserves to their intended use for milk production. A month of breast-feeding can do wonders trimming the silhouette, especially below the waist, reducing what we call culottes de cheval (“riding breeches,” or saddlebags); losing those pregnancy thighs is a true obsession with French women. The exertions of motherhood can be a great help if you manage the stress sensibly.
Here are some rules to live by as soon as you are running your own show, with or without others:
• Don’t watch yourself become a Botero sculpture: react. A little initiative and discipline go a long way. Now that you are making choices as an adult for the first time, make sure they are adult choices. The rules you violate are no longer your mother’s, and it’s no longer simply a matter of not getting caught.
• Career progress, marriage, and motherhood can be particular stress factors in these years. Mistakes, doubts, and failures are bound to befall you. The best defense is learning to savor les petits bonheurs, all the little things that make each day a miracle, be it a sunrise on your way to work, a flowering bush in bloom, or an unexpected smile from a stranger. In facing challenges, aim to be the master, not the subject, of your life: choice and risk are intertwined; all roads to success run through such an awareness. Keep dreaming intensely (too many of us stop at this stage), but seize the day as well. How you learn to live now will set the stage for the rest of your life.
• Sources of fatigue and tension will multiply; combat them with physical activities, not cocktails. Discover new forms of movement — yoga, dance, golf, tennis, or anything that appeals to you—but don’t neglect walking and stair-climbing.
• Tanning booth: NO! Sunglasses and sunscreen: YES! Think ahead: Better pale today than Botoxed tomorrow.
• Your metabolism is as high as it will ever be; enjoy it and don’t be afraid to try new foods, but don’t neglect fresh fruits and vegetables in season.
• Start paying attention to ingredients and what you are putting into your body. Even if you don’t plan to be a chef, a cooking class can be fun and change your relationship to food for the better.
AGES THIRTY-FIVE TO FIFTY-FIVE
“Not older but wiser” is a hollow consolation only for those who expect it to be. French women are proverbially and in fact at their peak in these years — we truly believe it. You can, too. If you have cultivated well-being up to this point, you are primed to reap to full advantage the experience and awareness of your pleasures, including food and sex. At the same time, as you must know, there are agents provocateurs conspiring against your hard-won equilibrium, including greater responsibilities of work and family. This may be the time for caring for both parents and children — a big squeeze. Gone is much of our “free time.” Even worse, we face a relatively rapid decline in metabolism. French women recognize this time as both peak and crunch, and the great majority do not surrender.
Denied youth’s seemingly infinite forgiveness, you now face the moment when lack of real commitment to healthy eating and living will show. It is no time for what mass-marketed diet programs offer. Even if you lose weight, you’ll gain wrinkles and look gaunter as tissue loosens with rapid water loss. And sleep beckons as never before. Remember when you could stay out all night and still go to work looking okay? Adieu to all that. Sleep deprivation shows big-time in this stage and becomes a major contributor to weight gain. Just accept that the days of burning the candle at both ends with impunity are over. Beginning at thirty-five, think in terms of a “rule of seven.” With every seven years hereafter, your body is changing enough to require an inventory and overhaul of habits. Don’t wait for round-number birthdays, which can often induce paralysis and trauma just when everyone is watching. At thirty-five metabolism begins its slowdown, and you can’t eat as you did in your twenties; if typical, you will start trading a half pound of muscle for a half pound of fat every year. At forty-two, hormone levels begin to drop until menopause at, say, forty-nine, when the serious loss of bone density also begins. For this reason, now is the time French women, lifelong walkers, also pick up weights. Resistance training is the surest way to reverse the muscle-to-fat trade-off that more than anything sets the twenty-somethings apart from their elders. It also retards bone loss and the slowdown in metabolism (remember, muscle burns more calories than other tissue types, even at rest). Now, you don’t want to overdo it, as Colette unfortunately did. Start out with three- to five-pound weights, and favor slow movements controlled by your muscles through the full range of motion. Momentum does not tone your body; tone comes from slowly controlled reps. Muscle bulk comes only from more serious weights. If you discover the gym as something you can enjoy—never a necessity if you stick to small weights (safe at any speed) and keep up your walking and multiplying your little exertions — engage a trainer for at least a session or two. As I still detest gyms, I have no advice on the ever more complicated devices they offer—they look like weapons systems. While you treat the upper body with free weights, do morning sit-ups for the midsection. Do them religiously. And for the legs, I have but one word: stairs.
One mustn’t underestimate the profound psychological and emotional impact of these years, especially if they include the very common traumas of divorce or losing a parent. It’s a stage when thoughts inevitably turn to our own mortality, too. Either you can become morose, or you can apply your heightened awareness to cultivating pleasures. (I don’t have to tell you which French women choose.) Having outgrown the youthful demand for immediate gratification puts you at an advantage for losing weight like a French woman. Also, having tried many things by this age, you know better than ever what delights and what doesn’t. No one can appreciate little things as much as someone who has done a little living. But you can’t ignore the debit column: the demands, even the reversals of fortune, may push you toward the zero degree of pleasures. Don’t go there. If you can’t name your pleasures, chances are you’ve surrendered too many of them. It’s time to start cultivating.
For me, these years saw the introduction of new types of food. I now love soy nuts, whole soybeans roasted to a crunchy texture and nutty flavor. There has also been a slight decrease in portions and frequency of certain known “offenders.” I’ve reduced my chocolate fix from daily to perhaps three times a week, and I also eat red meat less often. But doing it gradually, one doesn’t notice a pinch. It’s been during these years, too, that I have added the fifteen flights of stairs a few times a week to my scheduled walk. For me those twenty minutes a day have been key to holding my ground.
Dr. Miracle advised that if you look healthy at twenty, that’s more or less the weight you should keep for the rest of your life. Here are the basics for making that perfectly reasonable goal a reality:
• Increase your proportion of fruits and vegetables as compared with other food types, especially fatty and sugary ones, which you should aim to reduce anyway if you consume them frequently. Even a sweet tooth will re-equilibrate if conditioned slowly. Practice “less is more” more aggressively, avoiding meaningless calories and saving them for real pleasures. Enjoy them with attention.
• Try to pay more attention to the rhythms of your life, daily, weekly, monthly. Bring a mental dimension to your physical movement. Awareness reduces stress and promotes a feeling of well-being. Practice more controlled breathing.
• Carry water everywhere you go, and increase your intake to at least two quarts a day.
• Start taking a multivitamin with food.
• Learn to say no, with an eye to saying yes to something else.
• Build small rest periods into your day. (I used to go to parties and dinners straight from work; now I go home beforehand, take a shower, and do a few minutes of meditation. Result: I face the evening with renewed energy.) Take a breather at your desk: eyes closed and controlled breathing.
• Try to find new interests. Life seems fuller with novelties, and too many women depend on interests of their youth to see them through their middle years. Yesteryear’s novelties may be today’s rut. Relatively few of your possible activities have been closed to you on account of age. Curiosity, no less than openness to pleasure, is not the exclusive property of the young.
• Your skin will get dryer and lose some of its elasticity, but you don’t need surgery or stem cell therapy. You do need plenty of moisturizer and some sunscreen, even on days the sun doesn’t shine. Many French women, myself included, wear dark glasses whenever outdoors. It prevents fine lines while enhancing our mystery.
AGES FIFTY-FIVE TO SEVENTY-SEVEN . . . PLUS
With increased life expectancies, this stage, dismissed as old age just a few decades ago, is now for many one of the most vital times of life. (Better late than never.) Well-being, while not rare, is more fragile in these years, when health problems that might roll off a younger woman’s back can have much more serious effects. For this reason, pampering oneself is important. You must acknowledge the positive form of “selfishness,” which is not self-absorption, but a more refined and serene attentiveness to needs, comforts, and now limitations of the body. After fifty, most women have the good fortune of clearly recognizing the things they truly care about. It’s a time in life when we focus on those things, improve our lives through simplification, and get real about the things to be let go. In some ways, it’s when we learn to say no, not out of self-denial, but because we know better. The mind is never a stronger ally in wellness. Take it easy. This does not mean spending the rest of your days in sweats. It is the time to be not négligée (in the sense of negligent, rather than underwear), but soignée (elegant and groomed).
This time can be full of pleasure, but graceful aging requires some sensible renouncements. In a society obsessed with youth—always has been, but it used to be twenty-year-olds, not preteens—that’s not always easy and will require all the resources of self-awareness you have cultivated. Aging can be a crisis for any woman, but those who do it well are those who end up accepting it as natural. Mourning youth is perfectly natural, too, but some, like Hamlet, mourn too long. Acceptance is rewarded with the realization that life can go on wonderfully well.
The well-tempered mind is what saves us from dwelling too much on the past (regret and loss) or the future (no longer unlimited). The same mind and breathing exercises that we use to regulate proper eating help us concentrate on the moment and living properly. These years must be taken a day at a time. Every day is a bonus. With acceptance of one’s age and time remaining come gifts: a wise reluctance to waste little moments of happiness (whose preciousness the young often fritter), peace of mind that comes with tolerance, and patience with and less resentment of the world. If you do it right, time (which might seem an enemy) will seem more an illusion.
Physically, the worst offense is trying to be une vieille qui veut faire jeune (an older woman who decks herself out like a young thing): miniskirts, bikinis, too much makeup. They are not unheard of in France, where occasionally the well-preserved fall prey to the temptation of flaunting it. But there’s nothing lovely about a seventy-year-old woman at the market in short shorts, no matter how great her legs are. Modesty is de rigueur the more impractical it becomes to conceal one’s age. At that point, being natural is the best revenge. Surgery and rouge pots suggest one is not bien dans sa peau, which as we say is the essence of a French woman’s mystique.
The French rightly acknowledge there is a particular mystique to une femme d’un certain âge, an expression with layers of meaning, including respect but also worldliness and hints of seduction. Our media have no trouble projecting the sexiness of Catherine Deneuve and Charlotte Rampling. Here the difference between France and America is amazing. In Europe, men naturally find women of this age group desirable, even sexy, and are often caught turning around to look at one entering a restaurant. If she is eating alone, they are more likely to flirt with her than pity her. It’s inconceivable in New York, where eye contact seems to have gone the way of smoking.
If you are alert, aging seems to present you with its own commonsense instructions. But here are some adjustments to consider:
• Practice some routine physical exertion all your life, and you’ll be in better shape to continue. But if you haven’t, it truly is never too late to start. And the little stroll, which may have seemed a trivial improvement to your younger self, may seem more a life-affirming ritual, a reliable daily accomplishment.
• Revisit your food selection, and revise again in favor of more fruits and vegetables. Have fruit, especially berries, at least twice a day in season. Try to keep meat to once a week and fish to twice a week; eggs are fine, but no more than one a day; have lentils, green vegetables and salads, potatoes (avoid mashed and fries), brown rice, and, bien sûr, a glass or two of wine a day. Keep eating yogurt religiously.
• Meals and portions tend to get smaller automatically as the older body reaches satiety faster. Sometimes the problem is eating not too much but too little and suffering deficiencies. When one is having meat and fish, four to six ounces is sufficient for good nutrition, and even three is fine. Use your little scale to recalibrate your ideas of portion size. Adding the afternoon goûter is a good idea. A simple flan is a good source of protein and calcium. In fact, you may want to out-French the French and consider five smaller meals instead of three standard-size ones. Because their taste buds are no longer as sharp, seniors grow bored with their foods more quickly. It makes more sense to eat smaller portions than to force-feed a diet more appropriate for a younger woman, as sometimes happens.
• Be attentive to how easily you digest. Rich desserts may no longer like you as much as you like them. Reserve them for special occasions and have little portions.
• Lubricate skin morning and night. Don’t forget your hands—moisturize after every wash. (Old-fashioned Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion is fine. No need for outrageously expensive creams with genetically engineered ingredients.) Another remarkably therapeutic change: Add one tablespoon of walnut oil to your daily diet. Studies have suggested benefits for mood, blood flow, and heart rhythm; and it’s also an anti-inflammatory. This would have interested my relatives in Provence, who recognized this stuff as a magic potion. They used walnut and hazelnut oils frequently, but sparingly (they’re expensive), on salads throughout life. Both are also wonderful new flavors if you haven’t tried them.
• Water, water, water! I know I am harping, but when one has experienced eighty years of living, hydration is a life-and-death matter. When my mother reached her nineties, her doctor — not Dr. Miracle, alas, but of the same school — reminded me that at her stage, the two greatest dangers can be dehydration and sudden weight loss. “Je n’ai pas soif” (“I’m not thirsty”) is a common refrain among the elderly, but following his instructions, she emptied one glass every three hours.
By Mireille Guiliano in "French Women Don’t Get Fat", Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 2007, excerpts chapter 12. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.