French women staying slim

[scouser 4]

This is an interesting read. Perhaps some of the oxs from the UK could give it a read and try to emulate them.

 

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,9950,1342296,00.html

 

They don't diet and they don't spend hours panting round the gym. So how can French women put away as much ice-cream, rich pastries and steak frites as they want and yet stay so slim? Mimi Spencer gets her teeth into the 'French paradox', which has baffled the world's best scientific brains for a decade.........

[slow 0]

Slow food.

[rach 1]

It must be all the sex.

[jared 0]

For all of the articles trying to make it sound cultural and classy the bottom line is

THEY EAT LESS.

Is doesn't take Scooby doo to solve that mystery.

[Yuki's Passion 1]

 Quote:

Originally posted by rach:
It must be all the sex.

Great forget Kobe then Im moving to Lyon!!!

[NoFakie 45]

Me and the missus spent a pleasant week driving around Provence in September, and our experiences certainly don't square with some of the info in the article.

 

For starters (ahem), they don't eat three meals a day. At the chambres d'hote (bnbs) that we stayed at, the hosts and their French guests hardly ate any breakfast. Just one croissant, if that. At the first place we stopped at, they had all that sunflower-coloured local crockery and I thought "This is a nice cereal bowl". The hostess then reached over and filled it with coffee. As for "There are several but small courses, with plenty of time between courses for the physiological feedback to kick in", that is certainly not the case in the normal, generally non-tourist restaurants we went to. You would get three relatively large courses.

 

In between meals at 12:30 and 7:30 or later, we never saw anybody eating anything at a cafe. Just coffee, mineral water, wine or beer. Most places would only do cheese-on-toast or salad during that period. Many fitness books emphasize eating "little and often", but French people seem to have two big pig-outs with no snacks in between. Its just like sumo wrestlers eat. It must be what they are eating, not how much.

 

Unlike poor countries like India, in Britain and the USA, it is the lower social classes that tend to be overweight. I think there is definitely some causality in there.

[Ocean11 0]

I guess if you cook your own food with stuff you get from the market, it won't contain palm oil and fructose which have the miraculous ability to make people overweight in a few month's time and that are found in many packaged foods. Fizzy drinks also contain fructose which is converted directly into fat.

[klingon 10]

I wonder what the norm is in France. The French family I stayed with when I was young for a homestay were into big breakfasts big time - I was always really full after all that lot. They certainly were on 3 meals a day.

[veronica 2]

rach - what do you know then?

[Davo 1]

Yeah it must be all the shagging induced by all the raunchy porn they show on regular tv channels there.

[joshnii 2]

Do they actually?

[HeatherLocklearRocks 1]

I can never really see what the big deal is. It's just so simple. DON'T EAT LIKE A PIG AND YOU WON'T BECOME ONE.

 

All these gross masses of blubber complanining that they can't lose weight and stuffing their gobs full of mega-multi-calories. What the huck do they expect?