The same rerouting of blood happens on a much larger scale depending on your emotional state. When you’re stressed, your body also diverts blood (like it does when it’s cold). But in this case, it goes to the areas that (it thinks) you most need it. So picture yourself walking in the woods, and you accidentally bump into a snake that’s now ready to sink its poisonous fangs into your exposed leg. It’s none too pleased, and you’re not having a blast either.
At this, your body immediately red-alerts blood to the brain, lungs, and muscles so you can bolt out of there in a flash. At the same time, it sends blood away from your viscera (gut) because who cares about digesting food when you’ve got a snake to escape from. Pupils dilate and breathing quickens. This is called the “fight or flight” (or sympathetic) response of your body. No digestion happening here.
However, when you’re relaxed and calm and reasonably free from snakes, your body switches gears by routing blood away from the areas needed to run screaming into the woods. Instead, the blood goes into your visceral organs for digestion. In other words, your body associates digestion with your sense of calm. Thus, you digest your food best when you’re at rest. This is just basic physiology.
So why do we feel like we need to eat and then do something to “work it off”? Or eat on the run? This is completely contrary to our body dynamic and at odds with the practices of other cultures without obesity problems. The skinny people eat late at night all the time.
In France, you can’t even get a table before eight P.M. The doors don’t even open. Dottie and I were in Paris for our anniversary one year. Mom was with the kids, so we had a warm April evening to ourselves, and our only task was to find the quaintest nook in Paris for our meal. The mistake we made, however, was to start out around 7:15. No restaurants were open!
Walk, walk, walk. We were getting good and hungry and Dottie’s heels were not loving the irregular cobblestones. We finally found a place around eight that was still setting up. They looked at us as if we were solicitors (or worse … tourists). But they let us sit, very alone at first, as they got ready for the diners who actually knew when dinner was supposed to start.
Eating late at night is what all the Mediterranean cultures do. And it certainly doesn’t cause the 60 million healthy French people to gain weight. Their food doesn’t just “lay there,” it’s being digested. In fact, your body is designed to digest your food best when you’re calm and relaxed. And when are you most at peace and therefore best suited to digest your food? At night. At bedtime.
So don’t feel like you must eat dinner early or all is lost. It’s an urban legend.
Restaurants and the Portions Arms Race
What about when you go out to eat? As our obesity rate has risen, so has the percentage of meals eaten at restaurants. This is not just a coincidence, and brings up yet another French paradox. The French, of course, are famous for their restaurants, large and small, in every village, town, and city—and they visit them often! But their restaurants don’t harm their health, as ours seem to do. How in the world could that be?
For one thing, much of the food served in American restaurants (particularly at the fast-food chains) is faux food, and therefore horrid for your health. But heaped on top of the faux-food factor is the portion problem. What almost all our restaurants do wrong is serve forklift-worthy portions. This reflects the average increase in plate size from eight to fourteen inches over the past twenty years. Individual serving sizes have expanded, too: a typical order of french fries in the 1980s was 2.4 ounces, compared to today’s 6.9-ounce serving with 610 calories!
Why we have such enormous restaurant serving sizes was always confusing to me, until I was invited to speak for the World Presidents’ Organization in Scottsdale, Arizona. My host happened to own a chain of steak restaurants. On my first day, we were chatting away about food and health, and when I mentioned “portions” he perked up. “We serve huge portions at my restaurants,” he boasted, visibly pleased.
This position made no sense to me. If you’re the restaurant owner, why on earth would you want to serve too much food? Doesn’t this just needlessly add costs? Aren’t you losing money on this strategy?
I brought up this little irony, and he just shook his head at my greenhorn question. “My restaurants aren’t the only ones around,” he drawled. “I gotta compete with all them other steak houses in driving distance. If the store up the road’s got larger portions than me, I gotta match them or it’ll get around that I don’t give enough beef for the buck!”
I got his drift. If you’re working in a competitive “volume equals value” world, you have to meet this demand or you’ll go out of business. If your competitors crank up the portion volume, you’ve got to do it, too. If they have big plates, you have to have bigger plates.
It’s a portions arms race.
But we can’t just blame the restaurants for the quantity or quality of their food. The recent trend is to sue fast-food restaurants for serving food that contributes to weight and health problems. Yet we no longer have an excuse—we know what we’re getting when we walk in the door. And there’s nothing at all wrong with eating at restaurants that serve good food—especially if you keep from overdoing it.
Everyone contributes to the expanding portion problem—not just businesses, but consumers as well. In fact, restaurants just reflect the demand. If consumers judged the quality of their food on the taste, texture, and aroma instead of just size, the competitive ratcheting up of portions would be less of a problem than it is now.
Whatever the cause, restaurant portion sizes do help fuel our obesity epidemic. Two researchers who’ve done wonderful work on this are Dr. Barbara Rolls, author of Volumetrics, and Dr. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics. They’ve consistently shown that the typical wheelbarrow portions do in fact produce overconsumption. That’s because the added calories on your plate are not even noticed and do nothing to decrease the amount you eat at later meals.
What to Avoid When Eating Out
Have you ever seen an all-you-can-eat buffet in France? I don’t think so, unless it was put there as a tourist trap. This is the epitome of the difference between our eating cultures. All you can eat, for us, is a gorge fest where the very point is to make the meal “worth it” by eating your body weight in food. It’s not about enjoyment, it’s about excess.
“All you can eat,” for the French, means you eat until you’re satisfied. Then you stop.
The problem with harmful eating behavior like the buffet binge is that it becomes your default pattern that’s very hard to break. And as we’ve seen, if it does become your normal unconscious mode of eating, you’re in trouble. You may eat in control for a little while when you’re concentrating on it, but sooner or later your old ways will kick back in and you’ll return to the same disordered eating habits.
What you want is exactly the opposite—eating instincts that make you naturally gravitate toward eating less, not more. Each step we’ve covered so far trains your physiology to expect smaller portions on the plate and fewer between-meal snacks. These behavioral controls handle your eating habits for you over the long term, even when you’re not thinking about them. So don’t work against your own efforts; avoid the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Some Basic Guidelines for Eating Out
Remember the rules from previous steps: avoid faux foods, eat small bites, take your time, eat in courses, sip your drinks, have an ender.
Freebie appetizers like the bread and oil served before your meal can be treacherous. They come when you’re still hungry, so think of them as something you will taste, not eat. This is a good time to practice serving less than you’re hungry for and leaving a little on your plate even when you’re still hungry. This is the restaurant equivalent of planning on seconds and solving the clean-your-plate problem, all at the same time. But if you have a hard time controlling yourself here, don’t get the appetizer at all. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for overconsumption.
Often, one sol
ution for eating small is to order your meal from the appetizer menu. However, restaurants have long ago caught on to this trick by making the size and price of these selections little different from those on the main menu. But when you’re traveling, and cannot bring the Styrofoam container home, it’s still the best way to control the portions they’re heaping on you.
When you eat with others, order fewer plates than there are people at the table, and share them among yourselves. This allows you to taste a variety of flavors, and works particularly well with Asian cuisine and when you’re eating with family members and close friends.
Some restaurants serve half portions. If you find one that does, you should reinforce their good behavior by eating there!
A few places might offer the “menu”—the practice is commonplace in France, but can be seen as hoity-toity elsewhere. It’s simply a series of courses all linked together. The portions of each course are smaller, and they’re served over time. This definitely helps you control volume and extends the length of your meal. So if you find a restaurant that serves its courses in a menu, give it a try!
If your salad and main meal come to the table at the same time, eat your salad second. We normally eat the salad first, but that just means your main course will be getting colder by the bite! This causes you to rush through the salad to get to the entree. The solution is to save the naturally cold plate, the salad, until you are done with the hot plate.
When you’re eating alone, can’t share a plate, and aren’t on the road, make it a normal practice to have the waiter bring a to-go box with your meal. Before you begin, put half of your portion away before you even start. If it’s in the box already, you won’t eat it, and then you know you’ll have plenty left for lunch tomorrow. This puts you in complete control of your portions.
Restaurants don’t have to be hazardous to your health, but you do have to be ready for the amount of food you know they’re going to serve you. Cut it in half, split it among friends, and definitely plan on ordering less than you’re hungry for. That way you can have a wonderful lunch or night out without having to worry about it harming your weight and health.
Troubleshooting the Family Table
Problem: An irregular eating schedule.
Solution: Keep consistency where you can.
Many people who have work schedules that vary week by week simply cannot establish a routine for those around them, particularly when that person is the one who usually does the cooking! That leaves the rest of the family to “fend for themselves,” which can be a disaster for their eating choices and habits. And if you are the one with the irregular schedule, you can find yourself resorting to whatever you can find at the 7-Eleven on your way home.
Keep your main meals in the general vicinity of the same time. In other words, even if your breakfast isn’t at 8:05 exactly and you have to eat at 9:15, that’s okay. When this happens, you’ve got to try to get back to your normal scheduled eating times as soon as you can. So, for example, if you have breakfast at 9:15 you’ll still eat at 12:00 for lunch (if possible). But bear in mind that your time between meals is shortened—so you won’t need as much for breakfast.
Your eating environment should also be maintained, even if you aren’t eating at the same time of day. If you normally eat at your kitchen table at home, or in the cafeteria at work, keep to the same basic pattern. At the very least, maintaining a consistent eating environment serves as a behavioral anchor for you and helps reinforce your healthy eating habits.
Problem: No support from family and friends.
Solution: Have them join you—or distance yourself.
By making eating social again, we really introduce a double-edged sword. It’s wonderful to share your meal with others, but it can become difficult when those around you are not supportive of your efforts to eat small and take your time at the meal. Kids whine and spouses may tease about your lower portions.
If you can remain uninfluenced by the counterproductive eating habits of those around you, that’s fantastic. Otherwise, you need to enroll them into eating this way so you don’t backslide into their harmful routines.
Tina, a woman in the PATH Healthy Eating Curriculum, related how her husband would always comment on her small portions: “You makin’ love to that or you gonna eat it?” She tried to persuade him to eat this way with her, but ultimately couldn’t slow him down. He would be done by the time she was only halfway through her meal. So she ended up having to eat in two phases: the first part with her husband and the second part after he’d cleared out. Actually, she said the peace and quiet of the second half … wasn’t half bad.
Meryl, a woman from another PATH course, had a similar problem in that her husband brought home faux-food snacks to eat right in front of her as a taunt. Meryl told me she couldn’t be in the same room with the Oreos, so “that was my cue that I needed to go upstairs for my meditation/relaxation time.”
These examples illustrate the different ways of handling this problem: Enroll those around you, adapt to their habits without giving up your own, or just take yourself out of the environment.
Problem: Cooking for one.
Solution: Keep it interesting.
Eating at the family table sounds wonderful in principle. But if you’re alone and make a pot of spaghetti (especially as you learn to eat small again), you could have that vat sitting in your fridge for weeks until you are sick of that sauce!
Another issue that arises with single people who cook for themselves is that they get bored with their food. Once they’ve made their best two or three dishes, they’re faced with them over and over and just don’t want to eat them anymore.
The first solution is to never make the whole recipe. Especially now that you’re learning how to control your consumption, you’ve got to “downshift” and cut everything you make into thirds. This is the equivalent of serving less than you think you need. That said, some things may be made in bulk, such as chili or soup, as these will freeze and re-warm nicely.
To prevent boredom in the kitchen, take cooking classes. Literally spice up your life. Start with the standard ones—French and Italian—and then branch out. Learn to cook with spices you’re not used to: Thai with spicy sweet coconut, Indian with curry, or even Japanese cuisine. There are so many options, and when you are taking the course, you can’t go wrong.
Don’t Forget, Don’t Diet
Zoom out. Stop focusing so closely on the minutiae that you can’t see what’s really important for your weight and health. Macromolecules are important, but bigger issues affect how much of them you consume, from the top down: social eating habits, the people around you, the eating environment. All these influence your overall food volume, and therefore can determine your weight.
Have you noticed how this aspect, the human element of eating, never gets covered by standard dieting methods? Rather, you are encouraged only to account for fats and carbs, and so end up eating quickly, and alone. Your consumption rises, causing calories to increase, and you become another of the 95 percent of people for whom diets fail. And, unfortunately, many end up blaming themselves for a failure that wasn’t their fault. It was the method that failed them by forgetting the social importance of eating.
So here’s some advice for losing weight by living the French lifestyle without dieting: Eat well, and take your time with your family and friends to get to know them through each meal. When this becomes the priority it needs to be, you will find that the process takes longer, you enjoy it more, you eat less, and your weight and health are the final beneficiaries.
CHEAT SHEET: THE FAMILY TABLE
The atmosphere around the family table fosters healthy food choices, controlled consumption, and a better relationship with food. This same comfortable atmosphere can be applied at home, in a restaurant, and for single people as well.
To create an atmosphere of healthy eating:
Turn off all technology except the answering machine.
Schedule your time to mak
e the family table a priority.
Avoid the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Treat yourself right with high-quality foods.
Treat yourself right by setting up a nice eating space.
The Results You’re Looking For
IMMEDIATELY
You will love the eating environment you create.
You will find yourself more relaxed at the table.
You will talk more with those around you.
WITHIN TWO WEEKS
You will eat slower and enjoy it more.
You will control portions at home and at restaurants.
WITHIN A MONTH
Your family will have gotten so used to your new eating habits that they will be perfectly normal and accepted.
You’ll feel comfortable enough to never have to worry about overconsuming in restaurants.
HOMEWORK: SOCIAL EATING
Schedule your meals to include others as part of your commitment to your weight and health.
If you live alone, prepare the table so it’s an inviting space.
If you live alone, take an author to dinner.
Always people watch! Notice their eating habits in relation to your own.
Encourage those around you to eat small and race to be the last one finished.
The French Don't Diet Plan Page 19