The French Don't Diet Plan

by Dr. William Clower

  ALSO BY DR. WILL CLOWER

  The Fat Fallacy:

  The French Diet Secrets to Permanent Weight Loss

  To Ben and Grace. 129.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank my family for being supportive during the writing of this work and during the hurly-burly of this funny roller-coaster life.

  The best friend I have had in the process of publishing The French Don’t Diet Plan has been my literary agent, Stephanie Rostan. She’s a coach, a sane voice, a go-between, an advocate. In short, she’s everything anyone could ever want in a publishing partner. I’ve said it a hundred times at the bottom of every e-mail, but thank you again, Stephanie.

  Stephanie comes to me via the Levine-Greenberg Literary agency—specifically, through Daniel Greenberg, who initially looked at my proposal and decided to move forward on this work. One step back from Daniel is Sumya Ojakli, my longtime marketing advisor and friend who cast the first seed by introducing me to Daniel one year before this work was accepted. The best seeds have a long germination.

  My PATH friends and personnel have given me the freedom to write. Kristi Hannon, Rita Hanna, and Amy Young are gifts to work with. I can’t believe I’m fortunate enough to have people like them around.

  As this book was being written, an exceptional company, Citizens Bank, adopted The PATH for their employees. Their corporate program became a major influence in the creation of this book, as we received critical feedback from their employees on how to best implement the French diet for Americans.

  The publicity engine of Crown books, Brian Belfiglio, has been a great support as we’ve put together plans for making this work visible. Every time I throw an idea his way, and cringe to think I’m bothering him, he writes back right away with his positive and encouraging thoughts. Thanks, Brian.

  My editorial contacts at Crown, Katie McHugh and Carrie Thornton, have done a superb job in streamlining prose, refining the sense of my logic, and making sure the voice is consistent. Great job, guys.

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE: What the French Eat

  Step 1: Forget Faux Foods

  Step 2: Choose Fabulous Foods

  Step 3: Lose Your Sweet Tooth (While Eating Real

  Chocolate)

  PART TWO: How the French Eat

  Step 4: Spend More Time Enjoying Your Meal

  Step 5: Plan on Seconds

  Step 6: Don’t Eat and Drink at the Same Time

  Step 7: Eat All You Want (You’ll Just Want Less)

  PART THREE: Living a Life You Love

  Step 8: Return to the Family Table

  Step 9: Find Your Peace

  Step 10: You Don’t Have to Go to the Gym

  Appendix I: Real Meal Plans

  Easy Recipes for Fabulous Foods

  Appendix II: A Rogue’s Gallery of Faux-Food Additives

  Appendix III: Food Sources of Vitamins and Minerals

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Introduction

  On a breezy Saturday afternoon, you stroll along the Saône River that laces across the heart of Lyon, France. Your long-awaited three-week vacation has finally put all your work anxieties behind you. To your left bustles a hive of shoppers at the open-air market, where rows of vegetables are so bright you want to reach out and touch them all. Bags of fragrant spices almost beg you to pinch them.

  A little farther and the aroma hits—fresh baked baguettes, still warm and waiting for you to dip their crust into a bowl of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. You’d love to, except that you just finished a lingering love affair with a two-hour lunch: an appetizer of rich fois gras, followed by a tender slice of duck breast with garlic green beans, and a few taut grapes followed by the most luscious cheeses you’ve ever tasted.

  Even after walking for about thirty minutes, you’re not short of breath, nor are your legs tired. Your clothes feel looser against your body and, somehow, you’ve lost a few pounds. You pause at a bench to raise your eyes to meet the stately Fourvière Cathedral across the river, and realize that since arriving, you’ve eaten whatever you wanted.

  You’ve forgotten your diet.

  Despite the ease of the living and the luxury of the food, you’ve never felt better—or looked better. The only bittersweetness is the fact that you must soon go home to the harried world of prepackaged quickie foods. And you know that, once you return to that mile-a-minute culture, you’ll be right back where you started from. If only you could stay this energized, thin, and healthy. If only you could somehow re-create this atmosphere that effortlessly lowers your weight and puts you at peace with your food again.

  After earning my Ph.D. in neurophysiology, I was awarded a position at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences in Lyon, France, to study how our behavioral habits actually change the way the cells in our brains work. I expected to learn a lot about how behavior affects the brain, but I never dreamed that this experience would end up changing my entire thinking about food. I saw so many odd things about the French and their diet that just didn’t square with my American assumptions about what were—and were not—healthy eating habits.

  I found that the French break every one of our dietary rules. And as soon as everyone in my family modeled our eating behavior after theirs, all of us (except the cats) lost weight. My wife, Dottie, dropped that elusive last ten pounds, I shed twenty-five, and my mother went from a size twelve to a six. After these results became so apparent, I found myself awake at four A.M. transcribing my observations, trying to figure out what was going on.

  For example, early in our stay, the director of the lab walked us around a typical grocery store. I couldn’t get over all the dairy products—rows and rows of cheeses, an entire refrigerated case just for yogurts and crème fraîche. Something felt wrong though, and it took me about three trips to the store to realize what it was.

  Where are all the low-fat products?

  Each afternoon, I ate lunch in the Neurological Hospital cafeteria with my colleagues. And every day we ate rich, decadent cheeses to finish the meal. The first time they were served, I looked around to see if anyone else hesitated to indulge in food that was so “bad” for you. I asked one of my friends, “Is this cheese high in saturated fat?” To which she replied, “What are you talking about?”

  Aren’t they concerned about eating so much fat?

  Just after arriving in Lyon, we stayed at a little hotel in the restaurant district downtown. The September evenings were warm that year and we would’ve liked the windows open for a draft of cool evening air. But we had to shut them at night because of the ongoing clamor from the cafés outside. Everyone was still eating at the outdoor tables at nine, ten P.M., even midnight. The voices went on, talking and laughing.

  Their mealtimes last so long—and they eat so late at night.

  We moved from Lyon to settle in nearby Meximieux and, on weekends, my family and I would walk the streets of our little village. People would pass. They’d sit down at outdoor café tables, just talking and sipping coffee or something. One day, as we passed the magazine kiosk, I noticed a cover headline announcing a lead article on l’obesite Americain. Then it hit me.

  No one’s fat here.

  The Science Behind the French Paradox

  Despite the rich creams, cheeses, butters, and breads, the obesity rate in France is only 11.3 percent of the population (according to a 2005 survey by the London-based International Obesity TaskForce). And all those natural, unaltered dairy products have left these 60 million people with heart disease rates that are a full three times lower than ours. This high rate of heart disease is one of the reasons listed by the World Health Organization to explain our relatively poor life expectancy ratin
g. The WHO released data showing that eight of the top ten countries whose citizens live the longest are from the Mediterranean region, and France is number three. The United States, with all our wonderful health care and prudent nutritional advice, is ranked at number twenty-four.

  Somebody somewhere is on the wrong page.

  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American obesity epidemic has absolutely ballooned over the past twenty years. The very first assessments, in 1985, reported that no U.S. state had an obesity rate of greater than 20 percent. But by 2003, thirty-one states had obesity rates above 20 percent, and four of them had average rates over 25 percent.

  We’re only now coming to realize the extent to which our weight problems produce our health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes. Again from the CDC, one American now dies of cardiovascular disease every thirty-four seconds, and this is especially increasing in the fifteen-to thirty-four-year-old category. Diabetes costs consumers more than $132 billion in direct and indirect costs every year.

  And while our obesity and all its health consequences were skyrocketing, we were coached to eat low-fat products containing the hydrogenated oils that, it turns out, contribute to heart disease, the high-fructose corn syrup that we now know produces triglycerides, and the diet drinks that turn out to be associated with weight gain.

  No wonder we’ve had such a problem managing our weight and health.

  After diet advice has bounced us from low fat to low carb to low sugar to vitamin supplements, we’re simply left confused. I speak all over the country and the number-one problem I hear from dieters is that they just don’t know what to put in their mouths anymore. Do you remember when margarine was the heart saver? Now it’s the heart killer. Nuts used to be bad because of the oils, now they’re good because of the oils. Eggs would kill you because of their cholesterol, but now even that’s been solidly disproved.

  Meanwhile, even though everyone knows that the French way of eating produces low weight, healthy hearts, and longer lives, we still call it a “paradox.” Why is that? Of course, the French don’t call their own habits paradoxical, but when you look at the most current nutrition science data, the puzzle resolves just as nicely for us as well.

  The French don’t eat processed foods. A continual string of research results reinforces the commonsense conclusion that our bodies are perfectly constructed to process real food, not synthetic food products. And this makes sense, given our discoveries that faux fats like olestra require an FDA warning label, and faux carbs like aspartame are associated with a closet full of health problems. There are no warning labels on tomatoes, carrots, and onions.

  The French don’t avoid fats. We’ve recently discovered that the French were right all along. They’ve always eaten what we’re now calling “good fats,” such as those found in olives, nuts, and salmon. Even their daily dairy consumption of yogurts and cheeses is now gathering research support from scientists, who show how these foods may actually promote weight loss.

  The French don’t avoid carbs. Their carb consumption typically comes from such staples as baguettes, couscous, rice, and potatoes. As we’re now finding out in the aftermath of the Atkins revolution, eliminating carbs from your diet may produce short-term weight loss. And yet, without them, the nutritional imbalance causes that ten pounds lost to become twenty pounds regained.

  The French don’t take supplements. Their culture of getting vitamins from fruits and vegetables, rather than supplement pills, also agrees with lists of studies showing how common synthesized forms of A, E, and C extracted into pills can do more harm than good.

  The French don’t shun wine at lunch and dinner. We’ve known for twenty years, but have only recently accepted, that wine is a health food. The French enjoy wine with their meals every day, and it protects their hearts by lowering the bad cholesterol and raising the good cholesterol through its protective polyphenols and resveratrols.

  The French don’t rush through meals. Is there a more typical French habit than taking your time with the meal? Our physiology responds to this relaxed atmosphere by routing blood to the viscera for optimal digestion. And, because you’re eating slowly, your brain gets the neurohormonal message that you’re satisfied, so you don’t overconsume your food.

  The cultural eating habits of the French embrace so much more than our typical straitjacket diets. For example, there are no French eating plans, no diet products to consume at prescribed intervals, no shady ads promising instant weight loss, no cultural obsession around the food group “menace of the moment” (they eat fats, they eat carbs, they eat sugar, they eat proteins). This holistic approach is all the more powerful because it’s not a theory at all. It comes as a gift from their history and traditions, centuries old. It’s just what they do.

  When you break it down piece by piece, it turns out that the French paradox is not so paradoxical at all. The true irony is that we haven’t tried the simplest, most obvious solution to our weight and health problems—to apply their approach as a model in our lives. They’re thin. They’re healthy. We’re not.

  The Fat Fallacy

  In 2001, I published The Fat Fallacy to explore these observations of the French diet. It was a new idea at the time to propose that rich wonderful food is not the enemy. After The Fat Fallacy was released, I received an overwhelming amount of feedback. Many wrote to say how this simple idea had changed their lives, their entire relationship with food, and that they were losing weight on the same chocolates, cheeses, and healthy whole foods that the French eat. Some told me that their hypoglycemia had gone away, and they were freed from having to eat every two hours. Others wrote that their lactose intolerance had disappeared completely. And the best part was when parents let me know how easily they applied this new lifestyle for their kids.

  But there was a problem.

  We all agree that “if you do what they do, you’ll get their results.” We all agree that “find success, then copy it” works as a strategy. But translating the principles of The Fat Fallacy into practice within the quirky particulars of everyday life here at home presented a challenge. People needed much more structure and guidance in a specific nondieting “plan.” “It makes so much sense,” they said, “but what do I do?”

  We, not the French, are bombarded by television commercials advertising the likes of purple ketchup, low-fat salad dressing, and food products that have more in common with chemistry than biology. Our stores have three times as much faux food as real food, making it difficult to shop for healthy choices. What do I do?

  The French don’t have a lunch period, they have a lunch epoch. We normally have nano-lunches by comparison. One executive colleague informed me that she feels guilty for just taking time to eat. Most of us can’t take a two-hour lunch, or even a one-hour lunch. What do I do?

  Most French cities are living cities, set up for walking, not driving. There are no traditions of being couch potatoes, maximizing screen time, or spending an extra ten minutes sitting in the car, trolling the parking lot for the closest possible parking space. What do I do?

  They are less committed to squeezing a few more minutes out of the workday than living enjoyable lives. Their relaxed culture gives them a mandatory five weeks of vacation per year. And they’re not pushed to perform every second of the day until they collapse into bed. I don’t have five weeks of vacation. I’m lucky if I get two! What do I do?

  The PATH to Healthy Weight Loss

  All these concerns raised the need to solve the practical end of this equation. So I created a step-by-step weight loss program as a tool that anyone can use to make the success of the French lifestyle approach work, even in our busy lives. Unlike other support-group environments, our curriculum is taught for credit at the university level, as a corporate wellness program, and is provided for doctors and nurses in a hospital setting.

  The PATH to Healthy Weight Loss was created for those who benefit from individual instruction from our staff nutritionists, a
nd The French Don’t Diet Plan is based on that program.

  It is comprised of four key principles:

  1. Eat Real Food

  The French eat anything they want, as long as it’s real. This principle, eat real food, is so intuitive and can be applied anywhere from the family dinner to the office party to the baseball game. Unfortunately, we’ve become so inundated with what I call faux foods—chemical sugars, synthetic fats, and artificial food products—that now we have to be told what real food really is!

  Real foods are those products that are natural, can be found in a standard biology text, and are normally part of the food chain. Sodas never grew from the earth, margarine is an invention, and the dyes, preservatives, and stabilizers that give your food the shelf life of steel-belted radials were never meant for your body.

  That’s why you, like the PATH participants, can enjoy rich cheeses, fresh breads, chocolates, butters, wines, and so on, because they’re real. Your physiology expects nutrition to come from these sources. Is it any surprise then, that invented diet products and chemicals have been repeatedly associated with poor health, not better health? Thus, when you eat real food, you’re actually giving your body its nutrition in the very form it needs, whereas diet products work against your body and its natural tendency to be thin and healthy.

  2. Learn the HOW of Eating

  As a neuroscientist, I was trained to study the relationship between the mind and body, between the brain and behavior. I saw that they are inextricably linked: the brain causes behavior, but your actions change the function of your brain cells in the process. It’s a circle. But when I investigated our modern nutrition science advice, I was stunned to find out how little time was spent on training your behavior to change your physiology. Yes, everyone talked about “lifestyle habits,” but the lip service was not followed by coaching on how you’re supposed to develop those habits.