People on The PATH learn how the Mediterranean people control their portion distortion, chronic consumption, and weight problems in the process—and let me tell you, it’s not because of willpower. When you finally let go of the mental headache of counting carbs and calories and fats, and focus on the HOW of eating, your new habits take weight off for you. And, because they’re habitual, you don’t have to think about your diet anymore, as your new behaviors become trained into your brain in the long term. You can’t fall off the wagon; you are the wagon.
3. Reduce Stress-Induced Eating
The French approach to health is so much more broad than our simplistic “calories in, calories out” idea. If someone gets sad and goes into an all-out Breyers binge, they may gain weight because of the calories, but the calories weren’t the problem, were they? They were just a symptom of a deeper problem of responding to stress with the consolation of consumption.
Stress-induced eating must be handled or no diet—low fat, low carb, blood type, food combining, you name it—will make any difference at all.
To eat like the French, The PATH teaches the real world techniques for opening the pressure valve, in easy homework assignments that take no more than five to ten minutes. These include meditations, but also techniques to head off the vast array of subconscious saboteurs of your weight and health. Get enough sleep, for example, or you’ll gain weight. Learn to laugh every day, love every day, and live every day with a playful spirit, and you’ll free your body to release the weight it’s holding on to.
4. Being Active Without Exercise
People on The PATH are coached to be active, but to know the difference between activity and exercise. They’re shown the strong health benefits of doing activities they enjoy. And the main point of these movements is not the number of calories burned, but how much enjoyment you derive from doing them. That’s the only way anyone will be engaged for more than two weeks!
This program shows exactly why exercise must be something you love, not something you’re forced to pound out on a treadmill. If you’re walking from the cheese counter to the rotisserie chicken stand before ambling over the river to take in the art exhibit, you really are exercising. We’ve been coached that we must get the heart rate up to x percent of baseline for y number of minutes or it doesn’t even count. But it turns out that thirty minutes of daily activity, even if spread over the course of a day, promotes good health just as well.
Can you really eat well, lose weight, and love your food again? People on The PATH program have already gone through the lessons laid out in The French Don’t Diet Plan and have seen the results. They’re eating real foods and developing behavioral habits that keep them in control. They’re slowing down, tasting more, and getting the health benefits of chocolate, cheese, wine, and breads without dieting. Here are some of the highlights of what we’ve accomplished so far.
Weight Loss
Allure magazine conducted a “road test” of many popular American diets, including The PATH and Weight Watchers. Individual dieters were coached by representatives from each dietary team during a six-week interval. Weights, photographs, and interviews were obtained before and after the trial.
In this six-week head-to-head dietary comparison, The PATH outperformed Weight Watchers and all other national diets. The PATH program produced almost twice the weight loss as Weight Watchers.
Lower Cholesterol
Vail Valley Medical Center is a wonderfully progressive hospital that ran forty-six of their professionals on The PATH curriculum over eight weeks. Participants provided measurements of weight, cholesterol, and behavioral changes before and after. As a group, they not only lost weight, but also achieved significantly lower cholesterol. The average change of 13.3 mg/dL represents a solid decrease in this important marker for heart disease risk.
More important, perhaps, is the fact that this change occurred in a comparatively short period of time, only two weeks after completion of The PATH program. We believe this cholesterol drop results from the consumption of real foods, and the overall decrease in consumption reported by subjects.
Changing Behaviors for Life
Our corporate wellness clients also reported positive changes in their portion sizes, between-meal snacking, and fruit and vegetable intake. They accomplished this by reinforcing their new behavioral habits of healthy eating.
As research science has found over and over, losing weight is straightforward—keeping weight off is the hard part. But these behavioral changes reported by PATH participants are exactly the kind of results that must be achieved to form the basis for any long-term weight control.
Keeping It Off in the Long Term
In a recent follow-up survey, we asked PATH participants how they were doing over time. They reported how close they were to their target weight, and we plotted that as a function of the number of months they’d been at it. They reported that they were able to maintain their healthy eating habits—and their weight loss—over the long haul.
This is the power of The PATH approach embodied in The French Don’t Diet Plan. You are given the tools to lose weight but, more important, the means to maintain and continue that weight loss for life. In the end, these principles of the French diet end the need for dieting forever, and help you live a life you can love every day.
Why the French Approach Works
We’ve all heard that diets don’t work, and for good reason. Scientific studies suggest that typical dieters regain 80 to 100 percent of any weight they lost within five years. But we keep flogging away at the next fad approach because most people just don’t know an alternative. Maybe the solution is to stop trying to make a failed approach work, and stop dieting altogether!
The French don’t diet. They do think about their weight—but they don’t treat their food as we do—as a list of fats, carbs, and proteins to be eaten in a particular ratio (30 percent of calories by fat as a percentage of total daily intake, based on a two thousand-calories-per-day diet). Who in France orders carbs or fats? No one. They have bread, chicken with vegetables, wine, chocolate, and cheese. When they have weight to lose, micromanaging molecules is the last thing on their minds.
A woman named Pascal lived right across the street from me in little Meximieux. We were chatting about weight issues, and I asked her what French women typically did if they had weight to lose.
The corners of her mouth turned down as her eyebrows arched and she made that phhhfft-ing sound. “They don’t eat too much again,” she said, in her best Frenglish. It was a comical statement, but she was exactly right. In essence, the French change their own behavior so they aren’t consistently overeating—that is, “don’t eat too much again.” That’s the point. Losing weight is about behavior, not how some molecule is making one fat. It’s exactly why this plan works, and gets straight to the heart of why standard diets don’t.
Why Diets Fail
Why do diets fail a full 90 percent of the time? Standard diets tell you exactly what to put in your mouth. Yes, it’s true that if you get few enough calories, you’re likely to lose weight right away. The starvation diet, like all the rest of them, would work in the short term if you followed the moment-by-moment caloric dictation of what to eat. But most people can’t keep up with it every single moment.
You do it for a while, lose a little weight, stop, then your weight comes back.
In other words, diets treat the effects of the problem, not the problem itself. If you blow your nose when you’ve got a cold, your nose will be dry for a second but then the problem comes right back. Sound familiar? You diet, lose a couple of pounds, but then the problem comes right back. But you cannot live this way. If you cannot follow the dietary dictation and eat leeks or cabbage or fat-free cheese food or carb-free pasta products forever, your weight will just come back, too.
The problem we face is not excess weight—that’s just a symptom. So what’s the real problem? It’s a life out of balance, where volume equals value, where eating is a c
hore, where the family table is lost, where food is a synthetic invention, and where it’s considered normal for children to drink neon sugar water from a thirty-two-ounce Big Gulp cup with a straw in it. There’s more going on here than carbs and fats, and the French approach works by going well beyond this starting point.
Fix the real problem, and your weight handles itself.
Diets Don’t Work—the Data
A recent study from Tufts University confirmed that none of the major diets (low-fat, low-carb, Weight Watchers, and the Zone) are better than any other at producing weight loss. None of them.
But, as we would predict, the subjects couldn’t even stay on the diets for two months (22 percent of them dropped out). By year’s end, a full 50 percent of the low-fat and the low-carb dieters had quit.
The French Don’t Diet Plan
Part One, “What the French Eat,” teaches you what delicious foods you can eat so that your food choices are working for you, not against you. Instead of encouraging you to eat new chemicals to outsmart your body, I’ll show you why real food is the natural and permanent solution.
Part Two, “How the French Eat,” teaches you how to eat well. This is the heart of the lifestyle lessons that make your eating habits permanent. From the fork to the plate to the meal and the restaurant, these habits of healthy eating control portions for you, increase the pleasure of the meal, and remove your fear of food forever.
Finally, Part Three, “Living a Life You Love,” handles stress-induced eating with simple daily meditations, as well as practical tips to reduce the chronic consumption caused by stress. Don’t forget exercise, but you will notice a big difference in our approach in the very last step.
In the end, this book is your resource. It’s your practical daily guide in the store and in the home. So in the back I’ve added a number of my own recipes, references, and resources to help you establish your new relationship with food. These include flexible, real-world meal plans and a “Rogues Gallery” of faux food ingredients to avoid when you shop.
What You Can Expect
Don’t you wonder how some thin people can eat so little? Well, the body is an adaptive miracle and changes based on your eating habits. If you want to eat small like them, if you want to live the French lifestyle of eating, you really can. I’m going to show you how to adapt your physiology and psychology in the right direction. You will train your body to become like those who live the healthy French lifestyle every day.
You are finally going to meet the alternative to dieting, with a new set of healthy habits that become who you are at the fork, plate, and meal. Once you learn these, they’ll become habitual, and you’ll never have to think about your diet rules again. At that point, your new relationship with food will produce low weight without constant mental effort.
Expect the traditional French eating habits to work just as well at the office, on the road, and even at your yearly Thanksgiving feast. That’s the power of this approach: Your new unconscious habits will control your calories for you even when you’re not thinking about them.
And just like our mental journey to Lyon at the start of this introduction, you’ll feel a freedom and relaxation that you’ve never had on a diet.
You must have heard the clichés about how the French turn up their noses at bad food. Well, be prepared, because the first adaptation you’ll notice in yourself is a change in your taste for high-quality food. People write to say that they simply cannot eat anything other than real foods anymore, because they realize that faux foods taste terrible. When this realization hits, you’re finally at the place where you’ll never touch chemical faux foods again.
Your cravings for sugar will be the next to go, over a couple of weeks, although some may need longer. And once they do, you’ll naturally avoid foods with excess sugar added simply because they don’t taste as good anymore.
The next change you’ll notice will be in your portions at the table, and you’ll find that you need far less than you ever thought possible. This change happens when you begin using the behavioral habits that control gobbling. Our very simple changes will reorient your psychology, too. What looks like just enough begins to normalize. This change will take about a week or so.
Finally, your body will eventually stop needing food between meals. This happens within one to two weeks, much like the decrease you can expect from stress-induced eating. A few basic techniques will reduce these problems this very night, and you’ll see immediate results.
But you won’t be eating less, and more healthfully, by marching in lock-step to any calorie counting dietary dictation. You’ll be thinner and healthier because you love your food again, because you just can’t stomach poor-quality foods, and because you eat all you want to eat—but your body just wants less. You’ll do all these things because that’s who you’ve become, and you’ll live your new relationship with food every day.
The best part about this approach is that it has been proven to work not only for the French, but for our PATH participants, and in a hospital environment. It’s not simply a fad you hope will turn out to be correct one day. It’s time we stepped back out of complicated dietary miracle theories and returned to some solid basics of eating for health.
With these tools, you’ll be able to apply the habits of healthy eating that produce low weight, healthy hearts, and longer lives for millions of people. And now they’ll be yours forever.
PART ONE
What the French Eat
On the Saône River in Lyon, France, a lively farmers’ market sprawls along much of the left bank on most mornings of the week. The first time I came across it, I was astonished at the possibilities beyond our conventional American supermarkets. In this single stretch, vendors sell fifty varieties of mushrooms and more than twenty kinds of olives. The market offered dozens of just-baked breads, hundreds of fragrant cheeses, fresh poultry and game, along with countless herbs, greens, nuts, and legumes. Needless to say, there was not a box of macaroni and cheese or ramen noodles in sight, so I ended up buying fresh green beans, some baby red potatoes, and sliced pork for dinner.
Once I embraced fresh food as normal, I came to realize perhaps the biggest difference between the French diet and our own: They eat real foods, we eat food products. The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that the steady yearly increases in processed food product consumption reached $461 billion by 1993 and is still increasing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that the demand for these products is on the rise globally as well.
The problem? Almost all packaged products are laced with an Acme junior chemistry set of preservatives, dyes, thickeners, stabilizers, sweeteners, and acidulants, among other things. The ingredient lists for even the simplest foods, like Healthy Choice ice cream or Wonder Bread, neither of which should have more than five ingredients, consists of rows of unpronounceable microprint. I call these faux foods—and they’re directly responsible for sabotaging our weight-loss efforts.
Yes, faux foods are cheaper, because food companies can stamp them out with a shelf life approaching that of plastic. Yes, they’re attractive, because these same industries spend $33 billion per year to enroll your favorite basketball star and pop singer to endorse them. Yes, they’re tasty, because the chemical sweeteners are synthesized to make it 150 times sweeter than sugar. But despite the advertising claims of added vitamins and minerals, nothing makes those products healthy, and they certainly aren’t real foods.
Nevertheless, we eat them. Instead of eggs (cholesterol!) we eat egg substitute. Instead of butter (fat!) we eat margarine. Instead of bread (carbs!) we eat sorbitol-sweetened oxymoronic low-carb pasta. Instead of normal fruits and vegetables for nutrition, we chase junk food with supplement pills. Instead of natural oils (more fat!) our foods have gone through a chemical hydrogenation process.
In this section, I’ll show you how a simple return to delicious, ordinary food is the solution for permanent weight loss. The French, not surprisingly, don’t suffer our
dreadful problems with weight and health—but they don’t deprive themselves either. In fact, they’re known for the most famously sumptuous diet on the planet and have three times less obesity, three times fewer heart attacks, and they live longer than us—men and women. Think about this: If they can get those results, so can you.
I hear what you’re saying already. “I’m not a gourmet French chef. I don’t have an outdoor market of wonderful fresh healthy foods in my front yard (and no Saône River either)!” Or maybe you’re not sure how you’d ever go without the prepackaged stuff you’re used to buying. But I promise that it’s easier than you ever imagined it could be to transition from faux foods to real foods, even by shopping in your own local grocery store. Yes, there are a lot of products you’ll have to pass up—but this doesn’t mean you’ll be depriving yourself of any favorite meals (including dessert) or the flavors you love. To help you make the transition, we’ll walk through every aisle together and show you how simple the switch really is.
But first, and this is the toughest part, you must overcome any thoughts that hold you back. After all, embracing high-calorie foods strikes our diet-centric thinking as just wrong. This is often the first step at my PATH curriculum for healthy weight loss. People invariably ask, “Did you say give up low-fat and fat-free products? Stop counting calories? Forget low-carb diets? Can I really control my weight and still eat delicious foods?”
The French Don't Diet Plan Page 2