The French Don't Diet Plan Page 11

  Back home, if we ate for two hours—with our normal gulping habits—we’d plow through mountains of food and become gargantuan in no time. But, as I observed over and over, most French people don’t eat how we eat. Their habits at the fork, the plate, and the meal are more different than most of us can imagine. Our motto is to “get in, get out, get on with your life”; I think theirs might be “get in, get settled, get on with your meal.” But when you understand how they actually are eating, the paradox vanishes and you understand that their eating behaviors are what are making them thin.

  But What About Genetics?

  Could it be that the French physiology is just thinner because they have a population with “skinny genes”? And are we, by extension, overweight because we were programmed by our genes to be heavy? To answer this question, let’s just look at the plain data.

  One arcane academic trivia nugget produced by the Human Genome Project is the fact that the genetic difference between humans and the chimpanzee is only around 3 percent. Within our own species, population geneticists estimate that the genetic difference between us and our Neolithic ancestors is negligible. And yet, our obesity epidemic has exploded in the last thirty years (a genetic nanosecond). Therefore, whatever changed to cause this problem could not possibly be related to our genes. Since the global genetic makeup has not shifted in the past thirty years, it must be the environment: our food supply, eating habits, stress levels, activity levels. This is just plain, irrefutable logic.

  So let’s take a close look at the trends that have occurred as our obesity rates have been increasing. In a University of Miami paper entitled “The Macroeconomics of Obesity in the United States,” Drs. Gomis-Porqueras and Peralta-Alva show that—since the 1960s—our expenditure on processed food products has increased 135 percent, and foods eaten away from the home have increased by 132 percent. Portion sizes? They have expanded to become two to five times greater than they were.

  These trends show how our eating habits have changed. In the journal Obesity Research, Drs. Jeffery and Utter have shown more trends that have ushered in the obesity epidemic:

  From 1970 to 1994, we ate less butter by 13 percent, less whole milk, and drank more soda.

  We didn’t buy our basic sustenance at food stores (which actually declined by 15 percent), but got it at ready-to-eat restaurants, snackbars, and vending machines, all of which more than doubled in this time period.

  The beneficiary of these trends was the processed food sector of the economy, which grew at a rate of 41 percent, right along with our obesity rate.

  From 1990 to 1998, the U.S. population actually increased its levels of exercise, and the number reporting “no physical activity” actually decreased.

  Given these changes, our onset of obesity cannot logically be the predetermined result of our genes. The more obvious causes are these cultural changes that surround us. Our environment has become inundated with high-volume meals, fast-food eating, and faux foods. And all these changes have happened in lockstep with our growing obesity crisis.

  If you believe your weight issues are genetic, you’ll believe you are heavy by nature. You’ll believe you can give up now—you might as well not even try. You could imagine this to be a mental refuge from the struggle of trying diet after diet and failing on them all. And because 90 percent of people fail on diets, you’re in good company.

  But the truth rests somewhere in the middle. Some things you can change and some you cannot. You can’t think yourself taller or practice having a smaller bone structure. These are the cards you were dealt. On the other hand, if you dance you’ll get better at dancing. If you type, you’ll get better at typing. The question is not whether you can change your body, but where your windows of possibility lie. Where, exactly, can you train your body to adapt?

  This entire section is a message of hope because it answers that question. There really is something you can do about your cravings, your chronic consumption, and the food choices that have led you into weight problems. You can change your behaviors to retrain your body to crave what is good for you. Once you learn these behaviors, you’ll have them forever and can apply them for the rest of your life.

  That’s why the steps in this section are perhaps the most important part of The French Don’t Diet Plan, because they give you the tools to learn how to eat for pleasure, even here at home. This series of steps begins when you relearn how to determine an appropriate bite. You then learn how to slow down so you can actually taste your food and appreciate what’s in your mouth, develop a better relationship with delicious meals, and (as a happy side benefit) lose weight in the process.

  After we learn to slow down, we’ll solve portion distortion by redefining what it means to say, “I love my food.” As you learn these new healthful eating habits, we’ll also talk about healthful drinking habits. This isn’t about alcohol, it’s about the practice of controlling consumption across the board.

  By the end of this section, you’ll have all the tools you need from each step to achieve a lifetime of weight control automatically. You’ll change not only your eating habits, but your entire relationship with food, and that’s exactly what must happen in any long-term solution to weight management.

  In the process you’ll watch your body’s expectations change in just days, see your cravings for junk foods go away, and feel your daily food dependencies fade. At the end of each step you can see the changes that will occur immediately, within two weeks, and even longer. This is all accomplished through what’s known as your body’s “appetite thermometer,” the part of your brain that regulates hunger for your body just like your thermostat regulates temperature for your home. Turn down your appetite thermometer and you will decrease how much you’re hungry for.

  The end result? Learning the “how of eating” leaves you firmly in control of your body’s cravings, rather than the other way around. This is the greatest freedom you could possibly experience and is the biggest missing piece to weight loss advice today.

  Step 4

  Spend More Time Enjoying Your Meal

  Moments of culture shock happen when you step into the quirky mix of another environment. But they also hit you in reverse, after being away from home for a while and then coming back. By the time we returned from living in France, I’d become so accustomed to the leisurely pace of the French meal that I was in for a shock when I saw what I’d left behind.

  My wife, Dottie, and I were at a nice restaurant with white linen tablecloths, candles, and flowers on the tables. After debating the menu choices, we finally ordered. As the waiter left us, we noticed a couple just sitting down at the next table. I glanced at them a few more times during our dinner.

  By the time our main course arrived, they had ordered their meal.

  By the time we were considering our dessert and coffee choices, they were done!

  I thought something had gone wrong. Were they sick? Did they have an emergency? But a quick look at the table, and it was clear that they had just blown through a very nice dinner in about half an hour. I looked at Dottie and asked, “How do you even eat that fast?” How quickly I had forgotten that we used to eat that fast, too. This was the speed-eating cultural norm we’d both forgotten about, and one of the biggest factors fueling our incredible weight and health problems.

  In this step, we’ll talk about all the reasons this is true, and how to retrain your mind so you can slow down and control the size of your bites. This is critical because the faster you eat, the less you taste, and the more you consume to get that same sense of “flavor.” They’re all linked.

  PEOPLE ON THE PATH

  Dear Dr. Clower,

  This approach has changed my life in so many wonderful ways. I appreciate food so much more now. I take the time to slow down and enjoy what I’m eating. And what I’m eating is amazing—no more deep-fried, partially hydrogenated, prepackaged, low-fat junk.

  Real food. Fruit. Cheese. Bread. Butter. Fresh vegetables.

  As
a result, my skin is clearer, as is my thinking. My lifelong asthma has greatly improved, no doubt because I’ve stopped stuffing my body with chemicals.

  I’ve always been pretty active, but my way of thinking about activity has changed for the better. Now exercise isn’t something I do to punish myself, or to try to erase the effects of an overly large meal. It’s not another “should” on my list. Instead, it’s something I do for fun. For me. A nice walk after lunch, or some yoga stretches in the morning.

  Weight loss was the reason I was drawn to the French approach in the first place. And while I’ve enjoyed that happy aspect of the program, it’s truly been secondary to its greatest gift for me: learning to slow down and enjoy food—and enjoy life.

  —Jennifer C.

  Slowing Down

  After spending one afternoon with a French colleague at a restaurant in our little hamlet of Meximieux, I must scientifically conclude that frog legs do, in fact, taste like chicken. They’re sort of like buffalo wings of the sea. The texture is more tender, but the flavor is much the same.

  Even though these delicate amphibian tenders were to die for, even though we were eating with our fingers, it still took about two hours for us to make it to the bottom of the plate. I was amazed—back home, I’d be done with a plate of wings in about ten minutes.

  I realized it had been our friend Pierre who set the pace for the rest of us: eating a little, talking a little, and sipping crisp white wine before going back for the next frog leg. Unconsciously following his lead, we all ate in a leisurely manner.

  However, the habits we learn eating with others often set the stage for speed-eating instead.

  For example, have you ever seen someone eat with his or her arm around the plate? The person wraps such protection around it like a citadel, guarding the food fiefdom as if someone were likely to swoop down and scoop away his or her food, leaving our poor victim to starve to a slow, wilted death.

  I’ve spoken to more than a few people who do this and they commonly say that, as kids, they trained themselves to protect their plates from siblings or parents who would snatch the occasional morsel. They laugh because they know it’s a silly thing to do, but whenever they’re not thinking about it, the arm shield comes back out to ward off all potential pillagers.

  Speed-eating through our food has become a particularly common habit. Kids are given twenty-five minutes of lunch time, twenty minutes of which are spent in lines. Rushed parents grouse at kids who won’t just hurry up and finish their food so they can get moving to something “important.”

  Think about how this frenzied eating pace is reinforced into adulthood, too. Lunch has become something to “work through,” so you take enormous bites (bite-size has become defined as the amount you can fit in your mouth) so you can get through the meal faster. Even when your mouth is full, you have another bite on your fork or in your hands, at the ready, for the very moment when you can pack a bit more in your cheek pockets. And you flush your food down with your drink so you can gulp it back and get it over with.

  This happens not just at a meal, but during an entire day. You wake up in the morning and rush through your breakfast (or eat it in the car), so you can zoom off to work with a thousand other rushing people, so you can hustle through your workday, so you can run home, blast through dinner, clean up, collapse in bed, and get up and do it all again the next day.

  At every level, we have been trained to become a speed-eating nation.

  So what, though? What’s the problem with eating quickly? We absorb nutrients whether it takes two minutes or twenty to eat, right? Surprisingly, that reductionist view is just not true, and actually explains a major part of the French paradox.

  Speed-eating is a 100 percent calorie-free eating habit that produces and sustains your long-term weight problems. In fact, a recent study by Britta Barkeling and her colleagues at Hudding University Hospital found differences in the way men of normal weight ate compared to those who were overweight. One of the most interesting differences was that “normal weight men typically took longer to eat, whereas obese men ate faster.”

  The same result was found for kids as well. “The eating behavior of 23 normal weight and 20 obese 11-year-old children was measured for the total intake of food, duration of consumption, and the relative rate of consumption. The obese children ate faster and did not slow down their eating rate towards the end of the meal as much as normal weight children.”

  Thus, a slower eating pace, like that innately practiced by the French, turns out to really matter for your weight and health. And the reason this so profoundly controls overeating has everything to do with the way your mind and body connect.

  We typically think of feelings of fullness as being in our stomachs, because we sense them there. But this is not exactly the case. For example, say you get a paper cut on your finger. You look at it and say, “Ow, my finger hurts” (or some more colorful descriptive). But with just a little anesthetic, you could numb the nerve that runs along your arm and up to your brain. There would be a cut on your finger, but no pain. Therefore, the pain registers not in your finger, but in your head.

  Likewise, you may stop eating when you feel like you’ve had enough in your stomach, but it’s not your gut that’s telling you that. It’s your brain. To get those feelings of fullness into your brain, your body sends messages from many different sources (stomach, small intestine, and so on), through many different routes, such as nerves, and through chemicals released into the blood. And when they finally all drift into the brain, they get picked up over a scatter of neural centers, and have to get collated back into your subjective feeling that you’re more or less full.

  That’s why satiety, if it were a painting, would be Impressionistic. Somehow all these different brain sites with all their different messages sent at different times to different locations sum up to equal “Whoa there partner, that’s enough of them au gratin potatoes!”

  The upshot of all this sprawling neurochemistry is this: There’s a delay between being full and feeling full. It depends on your particular physiology, but it can take around fifteen minutes before those chemicals drift into your head so you begin to feel that you’re satisfied with the meal. This simple fact is critical to controlling your consumption, and explaining why the French habit of slow eating helps make them thin. When you feel that familiar bowling-ball ache in your stomach after a meal, that’s your signal that you’ve eaten too much too quickly. That uncomfortable feeling comes from the stretching of your stomach wall and happens whenever you take your body past “satisfied” and keep right on going into “stuffed.”

  Teenagers may be able to inhale a sandwich in less than a minute without gaining an ounce—I know mine can—but they are still immortal, omniscient, and have rapid metabolisms. In other words, a young person’s physiology can get away with this immature eating style, but the rest of us cannot afford to. We face at least two problems when we speed-eat. The first is very basic and obvious. We’re likely to take in too many calories at the meal and gain weight. But the second is even more important—we train our bodies to overconsume food in the long term.

  Think of it like this: When you eat, there’s an amount of food your body needs to live healthily. Let’s say that, on a scale from 1 to 10, your body requires a level of 6. If you’re eating hand over fist, rushing so you can get on to the next activity on your to-do list, at some point your body will have had enough (after it’s gotten to a 6). But remember, it takes fifteen minutes before that full signal reaches your brain and you feel it.

  Eating too quickly means that by the time those smoke signals manage to get up to your brain and say “Whoa there partner …,” you’ll have put in a food level of 9! You’ll have given your body much more than it ever needed and not only drastically overconsumed, but conditioned your body to keep overconsuming. If your body needs a level 6 of food today, but you give it a 9 … then tomorrow you give it a 9 … then the next day you give it a 9 … pretty soon it’ll t
ake 9 as the baseline volume of food it asks for. If you continue in this way, your body will soon be accustomed to consuming twice as much as you actually need. And this escalating portion distortion disaster happens simply by eating too much too fast.

  Whether you’re aware of it or not, you put your body in training with every act, every meal, every behavior. Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent. Eat large, and large becomes normal for your body. Eat small, and small becomes normal. You decide what kind of eater you want to be, and then be that on purpose until your actions go from intentional (consciously performed) to automatic.

  The good news is that, no matter where your baseline of hunger is right now, you can move that level lower. You can train your body to expect less food over time. And the very first step to regain control over your hunger is to practice taking your time with your meals.

  So here’s how to begin training your body in the right direction. Over your first week, extend the length of every meal—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—to at least twenty minutes. There are several techniques that can help make this happen. In the beginning, it might be helpful to set a countdown timer. Visualizing your food in quarters, allowing five minutes to finish the first quarter, five minutes for the second quarter, and so on, can be another very effective strategy.