Book Review: French Women Don't Get Fat

This morning I popped in a new audiobook during the commute:
It is amazing. Her writing style, advice, dry humor, I just love it. And the information is great too (I'm still on the first chapter, I think - it's hard to tell when you're just listening...)

A concept she touches on that I'm loving is that being overweight, as the author was in her late teens, can be viewed as an illness. Note here that I am not referring to being a perfectly healthy weight but struggling to find an ideal waifishness (yes I may have just made up that word, not sure actually) that is a result from those current fashion and ad campaigns where the women that are "supposed" to be so beautiful are either
#1) malnourished and scary (once someone has the skeletor chest it's gone too far...I can think of a couple of actresses right now), or
#2) photoshopped anyway. Believe me, I'm learning to edit photos right now and while I won't be making myself skinnier, expect to see nary a zit on my face ever again on this blog....and there's your disclaimer.

But back to the illness part of what I was trying to get at. When the author was overweight, her mother asked the family doctor to pay her a discreet visit, and he gave her a "perscription" of various tasks, like keeping track of what she ate for a while, then paring back her portions of rich and unhealthy pastries that she was ODing on at college, etc. I'm sure there are more to come, but like I said, still just in the first chapter.

(I had the "epiphany", which I put in quotes because I am 100% positive that it was not actually a novel idea although it seemed so to me at the time, that the reason girls can gain that "freshman 15" in college is because in high school, when you're often involved in sports, busy extra-curriculars, etc., you don't realize that you are actually exercising - it's just team practice. Then, when you go off to school, because your mind didn't code it as exercise, you don't notice that you're not doing it. And before you know it you've got a muffin top and don't know what happened....)

But I've digressed again. If being unhealthy and eating foods that don't increase your vitality and just weigh you down, needing to get stuffed in order for you consider a meal finished, and not really enjoying your dessert so that you have to have way more than you would if you were simply paying attention can be considered an illness, than it seems to me the changes you'd undergo in order to course-correct would seem a lot more pleasant than they do when they're part of that 4-letter D word (a.k.a. diet).

What a concept....wow.

This is, of course, coming from a person who's never been overweight so I recognize that I'm biased. However, my mom swears that the reason me and my sister have always been thin is that she never forced us to "clean our plates" when little and we learned thereby to listen to our bodies and determine when we were full, so maybe I kinda know what I'm talking about. (not to mention that I taught health and wellness classes at the Univ of F)...

So that's it for my ramble today. If you're wondering if it's good, get that book. If you don't want to shell out the cash for it (bad economy and all that, I get it), go to the library (it's what I did). I'm sure it's there.

Happy Wednesday!

And today's whiteboard quote:
"Be yourself. No one can ever tell you you're doing it wrong."
~James Leo Herlily