The French Don't Diet Plan: 10 Simple Steps to Stay Thin for Life - Hardcover
Wouldn’t you rather savor a buttery croissant instead of inhaling an artificially flavored diet shake? Isn’t taking a relaxing stroll preferable to pounding out early morning miles on the treadmill? The French live this way, yet stay thin and healthy. Now, with The French Don’t Diet Plan, you can, too!
In his groundbreaking book, The Fat Fallacy, Dr. Will Clower was the first to present a theory of how the French maintain low obesity and heart disease rates despite their seemingly “unhealthy” lifestyle. Dr. Clower learned that the French don’t worry about dieting but rather are more concerned with how they eat. That means paying attention to the taste, pacing, and enjoyment of meals, instead of counting calories, cutting fat and carbs, or taking guilt trips to the gym.
With The PATH, his revolutionary weight-loss plan, Dr. Clower has helped thousands of people lose weight, lower cholesterol, and increase energy. Now, in The French Don’t Diet Plan, Dr. Clower shows how easy it is to incorporate his remarkably effective techniques and the French lifestyle into a busy American day.
Dr. Clower has found that natural foods have overwhelmingly been pushed out of the American diet by what he calls “faux foods”: processed, additive-filled convenience products, often marketed as healthy with buzzwords like low fat and low carb. In addition, mealtimes should be a slow, sensual break for the body and mind—not a face-stuffing frenzy while standing up in the kitchen or sitting behind the wheel. As a result of such habits, Dr. Clower says, we are not eating what our bodies need, and we’re eating in a way that is not conducive to proper digestion. Science shows this precise combination of factors causes weight gain.
The French approach is about taking the time to enjoy real food without guilt or deprivation. Not only a successful path to becoming thin for life, The French Don’t Diet Plan will help you put joie de vivre back into your relationship with food.
The Most Delicious and Decadent Way to Lose Weight
· Formerly forbidden foods, welcome back! Learn why butter, cheese, bread, and chocolate are health foods that keep hunger at bay. . . . See Step 2.
· Spend more time eating! Discover why you should plan on having seconds and make meals last longer. . . . See Step 5.
· Hate to work out? Find out why you don’t have to exercise to lose pounds—and how relaxation can help keep weight off for good. . . . See Step 10.
· Now you’re cooking. Enjoy dozens of easy recipes for satisfying comfort foods, from Hot Artichoke-Cheese Dip to Creamy Alfredo Sauce, and Double-Almond Biscotti to Practically Flourless Chocolate Cake. . . . See Easy Recipes for Fabulous Foods.
In his groundbreaking book, The Fat Fallacy, Dr. Will Clower was the first to present a theory of how the French maintain low obesity and heart disease rates despite their seemingly “unhealthy” lifestyle. Dr. Clower learned that the French don’t worry about dieting but rather are more concerned with how they eat. That means paying attention to the taste, pacing, and enjoyment of meals, instead of counting calories, cutting fat and carbs, or taking guilt trips to the gym.
With The PATH, his revolutionary weight-loss plan, Dr. Clower has helped thousands of people lose weight, lower cholesterol, and increase energy. Now, in The French Don’t Diet Plan, Dr. Clower shows how easy it is to incorporate his remarkably effective techniques and the French lifestyle into a busy American day.
Dr. Clower has found that natural foods have overwhelmingly been pushed out of the American diet by what he calls “faux foods”: processed, additive-filled convenience products, often marketed as healthy with buzzwords like low fat and low carb. In addition, mealtimes should be a slow, sensual break for the body and mind—not a face-stuffing frenzy while standing up in the kitchen or sitting behind the wheel. As a result of such habits, Dr. Clower says, we are not eating what our bodies need, and we’re eating in a way that is not conducive to proper digestion. Science shows this precise combination of factors causes weight gain.
The French approach is about taking the time to enjoy real food without guilt or deprivation. Not only a successful path to becoming thin for life, The French Don’t Diet Plan will help you put joie de vivre back into your relationship with food.
The Most Delicious and Decadent Way to Lose Weight
· Formerly forbidden foods, welcome back! Learn why butter, cheese, bread, and chocolate are health foods that keep hunger at bay. . . . See Step 2.
· Spend more time eating! Discover why you should plan on having seconds and make meals last longer. . . . See Step 5.
· Hate to work out? Find out why you don’t have to exercise to lose pounds—and how relaxation can help keep weight off for good. . . . See Step 10.
· Now you’re cooking. Enjoy dozens of easy recipes for satisfying comfort foods, from Hot Artichoke-Cheese Dip to Creamy Alfredo Sauce, and Double-Almond Biscotti to Practically Flourless Chocolate Cake. . . . See Easy Recipes for Fabulous Foods.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Dr. Will Clower is an award-winning neurophysiologist who spent two years as a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences in Lyon, France. He is founder and president of Mediterranean Wellness, Inc., which administers The PATH Healthy Eating and Weight-Loss Curriculum adopted by corporate clients across the United States. He has been featured or quoted on the French lifestyle in print publications such as Marie Claire, Woman’s World, and Fitness. Dr. Clower lives in Pittsburgh.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
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
rst time I came across it, I was astonished at the possibilities beyond our conventional American supermarkets. In this single stretch, vendors sell
fty 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
ve 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 avors 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
rst, 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
rst 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?"
They're all asking different versions of the same question: "Don't I have to suffer through a hell of deprivation before I'm redeemed with heavenly thin thighs?"
The answer, of course, is no!
Part One takes you on the
rst three steps toward perhaps the most important part of a lifestyle of better health and smaller pants, the simple difference between what and what not to eat. Don't eat faux-food chemicals. They must be replaced with real foods.
Just as any meaningful change starts at home, Step 1 takes you on an all-out pantry purge. In the process of cleaning out the kitchen, you'll learn the faux-food ingredients that harm your heart and pack on pounds.
Once the fake foods are gone, we're going shopping together in Step 2. We'll stroll the supermarket, aisle by aisle, to
nd the good amid the bad and the chemically modi
ed ugly.
Because much of the packaged food we're used to is packed with high-fructose corn syrup, an intense sweetener, Step 3 shows how your switch to real foods literally changes what kind of food your body asks for and curbs your sweet tooth for good. Just as your body's need for high food volume will drop over time, your craving for over-sugared foods will evaporate as well. You'll recognize, by taste, just how much sugar
lls all kinds of faux foods, and they won't even taste good to you anymore.
In the end, your taste buds will return to normal-and so will your weight. You'll slim down, feel better, and have more energy through the day, effortlessly. And all this starts simply by getting to know real foods again.
Step 1
Forget Faux Foods
A few weeks before I was scheduled to leave for France, my wife, Dottie, and I attended a neuroscience convention in Washington, D.C. One night, our new French boss-to-be was taking us to dinner to introduce us to his Lyon research team. All dressed up and ready for a lovely meal, we met them on the sidewalk, piled into a cab, and headed over to the restaurant.
As soon as we got in the car, Dottie and I both were immediately distracted by Judith, the team's neuroanatomist. This young French-Portuguese woman was a svelte, awless, Sophia Loren-type beauty. She spoke with ease and elegance, clearly aware of every nuance of her manner and movements. It was obvious that she was a woman who really took care of herself.
As soon as we reached the restaurant, I became curious to see what such a careful French beauty would eat. I made mental guesses-a sparse green salad with a dot of low-fat dressing, perhaps? A plain chicken breast, hold the potatoes?
I could see her struggling to
nd something on the menu and understood why only after we got to France, because normally she would order choices like foie gras, a rich duck breast with veggies, followed by a little dessert (a tart or crème brûlée) and some cheese.
At one point, as we chatted and waited for our meals, Judith slowly leaned over the middle of the table to scrutinize the little round packets of nondairy creamer.
"What ees zat?" she asked me, pointedly, as if I were responsible.
"Ah," I responded. Easy question. "That's nondairy creamer."
She frowned. "Yes, but what ees zat?" she said, a bit more emphatically this time. She held one tiny container of the liquid up to the light, clearly disturbed. I started trying to regurgitate my organic chemistry background for a cogent answer when my new boss saved me from my stammer of obscure nomenclature. "It's arti
cial cream-read the ingredients," he told her. "Americans put it in their coffee."
"No," she breathed. "Een zer coffee?? Zats deesgusting!" Then she warily poked her
nger through the remainder of the plastic packets in the bowl, as though she might be bitten by some new lurking threat.
Seizing the moment, I informed her that arti
cial foods were quite normal here. Hadn't she ever heard of Sweet'n Low? Sugar-free Jell-O? After her near-death experience with the nondairy dairy product, we had her going with outrageous shock and dismay. She'd just never seen the fake foods that I-like all of us-had come to accept as perfectly normal.
Of course, at the time, I thought she was the crazy one. Only a few months later, the tables were turned and my family and I were the ones in culture shock. This time, it was the very lack of arti
cial foods and quickie prepackaged products around us that was so strange. In fact, we found ourselves forced to buy full-calorie, full-avor "real" foods simply because there was nothing else to choose from. Our meals always tasted wonderful, but I was sure we'd return from our two years abroad each at least twenty pounds heavier. It just didn't happen. Just a few months into our trip, it became clear that we were breaking every dietary rule in the book and losing weight anyway!
If there are secrets to the French love affair with the meal, or unspoken advice about what's keeping them thin and healthy, the
rst is their insistence on high-quality natural foods that come from the earth, not a chemical plant. This is so simple, so intuitively correct.
How to Recognize a Faux Food
Avoiding faux foods doesn't sound too hard, until you sift through the parade of products lining our store shelves. How do you know what's healthy and what's not? Take bread, for example. The French eat baguettes every day. But does that make plastic-wrapped spongy "white bread" that lasts for two weeks okay to eat? No! And that begs the question again, how do you know the difference between real bread and fake bread, between real food and faux food?
To sort this out, let's do a thought...
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
rst time I came across it, I was astonished at the possibilities beyond our conventional American supermarkets. In this single stretch, vendors sell
fty 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
ve 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 avors 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
rst, 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
rst 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?"
They're all asking different versions of the same question: "Don't I have to suffer through a hell of deprivation before I'm redeemed with heavenly thin thighs?"
The answer, of course, is no!
Part One takes you on the
rst three steps toward perhaps the most important part of a lifestyle of better health and smaller pants, the simple difference between what and what not to eat. Don't eat faux-food chemicals. They must be replaced with real foods.
Just as any meaningful change starts at home, Step 1 takes you on an all-out pantry purge. In the process of cleaning out the kitchen, you'll learn the faux-food ingredients that harm your heart and pack on pounds.
Once the fake foods are gone, we're going shopping together in Step 2. We'll stroll the supermarket, aisle by aisle, to
nd the good amid the bad and the chemically modi
ed ugly.
Because much of the packaged food we're used to is packed with high-fructose corn syrup, an intense sweetener, Step 3 shows how your switch to real foods literally changes what kind of food your body asks for and curbs your sweet tooth for good. Just as your body's need for high food volume will drop over time, your craving for over-sugared foods will evaporate as well. You'll recognize, by taste, just how much sugar
lls all kinds of faux foods, and they won't even taste good to you anymore.
In the end, your taste buds will return to normal-and so will your weight. You'll slim down, feel better, and have more energy through the day, effortlessly. And all this starts simply by getting to know real foods again.
Step 1
Forget Faux Foods
A few weeks before I was scheduled to leave for France, my wife, Dottie, and I attended a neuroscience convention in Washington, D.C. One night, our new French boss-to-be was taking us to dinner to introduce us to his Lyon research team. All dressed up and ready for a lovely meal, we met them on the sidewalk, piled into a cab, and headed over to the restaurant.
As soon as we got in the car, Dottie and I both were immediately distracted by Judith, the team's neuroanatomist. This young French-Portuguese woman was a svelte, awless, Sophia Loren-type beauty. She spoke with ease and elegance, clearly aware of every nuance of her manner and movements. It was obvious that she was a woman who really took care of herself.
As soon as we reached the restaurant, I became curious to see what such a careful French beauty would eat. I made mental guesses-a sparse green salad with a dot of low-fat dressing, perhaps? A plain chicken breast, hold the potatoes?
I could see her struggling to
nd something on the menu and understood why only after we got to France, because normally she would order choices like foie gras, a rich duck breast with veggies, followed by a little dessert (a tart or crème brûlée) and some cheese.
At one point, as we chatted and waited for our meals, Judith slowly leaned over the middle of the table to scrutinize the little round packets of nondairy creamer.
"What ees zat?" she asked me, pointedly, as if I were responsible.
"Ah," I responded. Easy question. "That's nondairy creamer."
She frowned. "Yes, but what ees zat?" she said, a bit more emphatically this time. She held one tiny container of the liquid up to the light, clearly disturbed. I started trying to regurgitate my organic chemistry background for a cogent answer when my new boss saved me from my stammer of obscure nomenclature. "It's arti
cial cream-read the ingredients," he told her. "Americans put it in their coffee."
"No," she breathed. "Een zer coffee?? Zats deesgusting!" Then she warily poked her
nger through the remainder of the plastic packets in the bowl, as though she might be bitten by some new lurking threat.
Seizing the moment, I informed her that arti
cial foods were quite normal here. Hadn't she ever heard of Sweet'n Low? Sugar-free Jell-O? After her near-death experience with the nondairy dairy product, we had her going with outrageous shock and dismay. She'd just never seen the fake foods that I-like all of us-had come to accept as perfectly normal.
Of course, at the time, I thought she was the crazy one. Only a few months later, the tables were turned and my family and I were the ones in culture shock. This time, it was the very lack of arti
cial foods and quickie prepackaged products around us that was so strange. In fact, we found ourselves forced to buy full-calorie, full-avor "real" foods simply because there was nothing else to choose from. Our meals always tasted wonderful, but I was sure we'd return from our two years abroad each at least twenty pounds heavier. It just didn't happen. Just a few months into our trip, it became clear that we were breaking every dietary rule in the book and losing weight anyway!
If there are secrets to the French love affair with the meal, or unspoken advice about what's keeping them thin and healthy, the
rst is their insistence on high-quality natural foods that come from the earth, not a chemical plant. This is so simple, so intuitively correct.
How to Recognize a Faux Food
Avoiding faux foods doesn't sound too hard, until you sift through the parade of products lining our store shelves. How do you know what's healthy and what's not? Take bread, for example. The French eat baguettes every day. But does that make plastic-wrapped spongy "white bread" that lasts for two weeks okay to eat? No! And that begs the question again, how do you know the difference between real bread and fake bread, between real food and faux food?
To sort this out, let's do a thought...
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