The French Don't Diet Plan Read online

  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 first 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 find the good amid the bad and the chemically modified 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 fills 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, flawless, 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 find 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 artificial 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 finger 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 artificial 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 artificial foods and quickie prepackaged products around us that was so strange. In fact, we found ourselves forced to buy full-calorie, full-flavor “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 first 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 experiment. Say I took a photograph of a fresh baguette. Our modern technology allows you to see an image that looks exactly like bread. If someone asked you what it was, you could certainly identify it. But would you eat the picture? Of course not. You can see it’s not food; it’s a photograph.

  What if I made a three-dimensional replica from a plastic polymer and painted it so well that it looked exactly like an authentic baguette? Our modern technology can make it look so real that you wouldn’t even be able to tell it was fake until you put your hands on it. Would you eat that bread? Would you cut it into pieces, put it in your mouth, and swallow it? Of course not, because you can tell by touch that it’s not food. It’s a synthetic model.

  What if, instead, food chemists made a bread model that simulated the texture of real bread? Our modern technology can replace the harder plastics with synthetic, partially hydrogenated oils.

  What if they spritzed the model with odorants so it actually made your mouth water with the homey aroma of freshly baked bread straight from the oven? Our modern technology can produce edible chemicals that easily conjure the smell and taste of wonderful breads.

  So the bread now looks like it’s not fake, smells like it’s not fake, tastes like it’s not fake, and even feels like it’s not fake. Are you going to eat this bread? Let me tell you, people eat synthetic products designed to appear as though they’re not fake every single day!

  Some popular diets will tell you it’s okay to eat bread, others say to avoid it like the plague. But when it comes to our health, the problem is not with the carbohydrates—it’s whether the bread we’re eating is actually food or if its nutritional value has been replaced with artificial substitutes.

  At one PATH curriculum seminar here in Pennsylvania, a man from the audience spoke to me about his father, who had worked as a food chemist for Heinz many years. He said his dad would come home with little bottles and have his kids try his concoctions. He remembered one bottle of gray gloop in particular. He was told to close his eyes and try it from a teaspoon.

  “Ketchup,” dismissed the boy. “That’s just ketchup.”

  “Aha!” the father beamed. “But there’s not one single tomato in there!”

  His father had managed to simulate the taste and feel of tomato ketchup in a chemistry lab. A terrific accomplishment of science, no doubt, but is it food? Of course not.

  This is the most stunning, mind-bending fact of our modern technological world. We are allowed, coached, and even encouraged to eat things that are not food. Given this tendency, here are some star
ter rules to remember.

  Check the ingredients—they must be natural. And the best foods are ones that don’t require labels for you to know what they are!

  How to Read Labels

  The European Union has tried a couple of times to introduce FDA-style labels with our standard nutritional calculus of the food listed on the back. But they can’t get it done because there’s just no market for it. No one wants or needs it because they’re not agonizing over the grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrates in their foods.

  The French don’t go to the store to buy grams of this or that. They go to buy food.

  That said, here in America, you really should read the labels unless you’re absolutely sure of the food source, because of the reasons we’ve mentioned—that so many normal-looking foods are actually fake. But when you do peruse that periodic table on the back of the box, don’t sweat the amount of macromolecules (your healthy eating habits will limit your consumption of them for you!—see Part Two). Rather, look to see whether the ingredients are real; they should have grown from the earth, have had a mama and a daddy, or can be found in a standard biology text.

  For example, bread made with flour, salt, water, and yeast is good. That made with thirty-seven unpronounceable ingredients is not—and it makes no difference whatsoever how many carbs, fats, or proteins are in that product. Tons of lab bench chemicals are fat free, and tons more are carb free. But you shouldn’t be eating any of them!

  I hope you see the point. We’ve been coached to read labels for the wrong things. By being overly focused on the macromolecules, we’ve allowed ourselves to eat hydrogenated oils that are harming our hearts and high-fructose corn syrup that helps make us fat. When you read the labels for real foods, you avoid all that because there are no synthetic dyes in an apple or chemical sweeteners in a tomato.

  Why Avoid Faux Food?

  Never before in human history (until now) have we had to ask the question, What is food? Our biology took care of that for us, through our senses. But now, synthetics can fool our physiology into thinking something’s okay to consume, when it’s nothing but a cheap imitation, a faux food that undermines your weight and health.

  Think about your body like any other machine for just a moment. The synergy between its optimal functioning and its energy source is absolutely vital—the kind of machine, for example, must match the particular fuel it expects. Cars run on gas. Computers run on electricity. And our physiology runs most efficiently on real food. Put a banana in a gas tank and the car won’t run. Put gasoline in people and they won’t run either.

  Real Food for Thought

  Why do we have to qualify “food” with the word real anyway, as if there’s a food out there that’s not real?

  All food is real food-so calling it “real” is redundant.

  All inventions are not food.

  So let’s just cut the jargon and make life simple: Eat food. And if it ain’t food, don’t eat it.

  You may be twenty-nine years old (and holding …), but your body lives at the end of a long genetic thread that’s eons old. You exist as part of an ancient living gift whose history trails back far beyond memory. Your physiology is alive today because of its fuel sources, which come from the earth.

  Strawberry Flavoring

  Amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl keton, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, thyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), alpha-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methyl acetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamet, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, gamma undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

  Look at these ingredients. This is not food.

  Over forgotten ages, the food grown here has adapted to us, and we to it. This is a mutual biological understanding, a relationship, and it’s as strong and established as our species itself. We exist because of this relationship, we thrive because of it, and we compromise our health as soon as we lose sight of it.

  Somehow we’ve moved away from this biological heritage of food in favor of man-made chemicals. We try to fool our taste buds with synthetic imitations, put them in a package, and sell them. But any product of this sort, by definition, cannot be food simply because our physiology has no biological context for inventions. If you need a rule to follow for your best health, don’t eat inventions.

  If we forget the depth and importance of this most basic synergy, we will undermine the very foundation of our health. Our physiology is not an invention, and its food should not be either. These synthetics have never been alive or a part of the food chain. They’ve never been a part of our biology or present in the environment before the last biological nanosecond. If you give your body something it has never encountered, that it has no context for or relationship with, you will introduce weight and health problems. You might as well stick a banana in your gas tank.

  Need a real world example? High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is made to simulate sweeteners like sugar, but your body doesn’t recognize it as sugar. That’s why your liver, which normally filters toxins, has to process it instead of your insulin response system, leaving you with elevated triglycerides.

  The problem we run into is that so many inventions spill from the grocers’ shelves that we assume they’re normal, nod our heads at the marketing, and eat them anyway: chemical fats, synthetic sugars, drinks made with phosphoric acid and high-fructose corn syrup (aka soda), plasticized fruit sheets, neon ketchup, and snack cakes with the shelf life of motor oil.

  Food companies would have you eat butter that never saw a cow and eggs that never saw a chicken. Others would feed you trans fats that the FDA now requires companies disclose on food labels, and the olestra faux fat that wicks vitamins out of your body so that the FDA requires a warning label on any product that contains it. Scads of diet drinks and chemically sugared candy bars and shakes line the shelves.

  Now we’re finding that these ingested inventions—hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and so on, are linked to cancer (preservatives like BHT) and heart problems (hydrogenated oils). Does this surprise you, really? Who is shocked by the fact that novelties from the chem lab bench create problems in a body that expects normal foods?

  Don’t eat inventions. We have a hard enough time with our weight and health as it is. Don’t create problems!

  PEOPLE ON THE PATH

  Dear Will,

  As long as I can remember, my mom was a fanatic for Coca-Cola. And by the time I went to college I was well entrenched in a four-or-five-Cokes-a-day habit. This lasted until I read about your approach, and I finally gave it up.

  In September 2004, my beautiful beach wedding was canceled courtesy of Hurricane Ivan, and we threw together another wedding in four days. After the stress of all that, my new husband and I finally made it to the Keys for our honeymoon, and I felt I had certainly earned a Coke. I was sooo anticipating that first, fizzy sip for breakfast (college habit—horrifying), but when I tasted it, I was sure the can had gone bad. It was awful! Nothing but chemicals and enough sugar to rot my teeth on the spot.

  I actually sipped through two cans before I realized that it must have always tasted this way. It was supposed to taste this way! Out came the fresh-squeezed OJ and Perrier (lovely fizz, by the way), and I’ve never looked back.

  By the way, for years I’ve been on the highest possible dose of prescription acid reducer for acid reflux. After a while on your plan, I take a pill only as needed, if at all.

  Thank you so much,

  Erin L.
r />   Friend or Faux?

  It’s time for a fresh start. It’s time to clear the corners and cubbies of the old foods that have been keeping you from reaching your goals for so long. You have a chance now for a clean start, like a good thorough spring cleaning for your physiology that will detox your entire system. But before we shop for real food again, we have to get the chemistry set out of the cupboard.

  Unfortunately, when you look for real food in your pantry you may find that the most familiar items are the first ones to go! That’s because we’ve been sold these choices for so long that what we automatically think of as “normal” has changed. Normal used to be fruit, now it’s Fruit Roll-Ups and fruit-flavored products. Normal used to be Cheddar cheese, now it’s Cheddar goldfish. Normal used to be apple turnovers, now it’s apple Pop-Tarts. We have become so inundated with food products that we’ve lost our sense of what real food really is.

  But in order to eat clean again, you’ve got to shed the junk, cleanse your system of faux foods, and find a new, old-fashioned normal again.

  Get a large garbage bag (maybe two) and open your cupboards. Read through the ingredient list on every item, looking for the faux-food chemicals that are listed below. Then make a decision—friend or faux? The friends stay, but the faux has got to go.

  One by one, toss them in the trash. To be sure, at first you’ll wince at “wasting” these products, and may consider donating them to a food bank—but then aren’t you giving all the faux foods to the people who most need better nutrition anyway? You could ease your conscience by just tossing them into the Dumpster as a commitment to your health, and making a healthy canned or boxed food donation instead. If you return home from the heap and change your mind, don’t worry. You can always go back, dig through the banana peels and coffee grounds and find these products again. They’ll taste no different than they ever did.