The French Don't Diet Plan Page 9

  If they’re not in the snacks section, look for dried fruits by the produce. They make wonderful nibbles or additions to your morning yogurt: raisons, dried plums, apricots, figs, cranberries, cherries, and bananas. Throw these in a bag with some brazil nuts or cashews and you’ve got a righteous trail mix.

  BEST: Plain popcorn, unsalted nuts, baked chips, dried fruits.

  ACCEPTABLE: Salted nuts, lightly sugared berries such as cranberries.

  FAUX: Bagged popcorn, flavored potato chips, and chips with hydrogenated oils.

  HOW OFTEN TO BUY: Snacks should be a rarity. Purchase perhaps once every other week.

  Z. Checkout

  Is there ever anything of redeeming value in the impulse aisle? Think about it for just a minute. “Bat-Boy Emerges from Hell to Terrorize Small Texas Hamlet.” “Are Jen and (fill in the blank) on the Verge of Divorce?” Thirty-two colors of Tic Tacs crowd the Life Savers and sorbitol gum. It’s a circus in that space, from one end to the other.

  I know it’s fun to buy things, especially when you’re bored and waiting for the woman in front of you to figure out how to work the auto teller. But you’ll get more nutritional value by eating the “Bat-Boy Emerges from Hell” article than you will from anything in the impulse aisle.

  BEST: If you’re lucky, you might be able to find a quality dark chocolate here, but most of these items are less healthful than the Duracell batteries they’re next to.

  ACCEPTABLE: Nothing, really.

  FAUX: Chewing gum tape, candies, mouth cracklin’ poppers, the zoo of gummy animals. All of it.

  HOW OFTEN TO BUY: You don’t need these, and neither do your children.

  Troubleshooting

  Expect that your first two trips to the store will take some reorientation. You have to change how you read labels as you learn to avoid faux foods and bring home real foods. But by the third trip out, you’ll have already found the few cereals of any nutritional value, and you’ll have identified the healthy cheeses and the canned vegetables without corn syrup in them. At that point, it’s a piece of cake!

  Don’t be swayed by the advertisements for the products you always thought were healthful, like those low-fat foods with synthetic sugars and oils, or the “real fruit juice” imposters, or the “fresh” breads wrapped in plastic with thirty-two ingredients in them. Make sure the foods you bring home are real foods.

  It’s best to go shopping by yourself at first, so you can keep to your resolve. If you go with your children (or spouse), you might be tempted to buy Pop-Tarts because of the picture of a blueberry on the box. Remember, if you don’t bring home faux foods, they won’t get eaten.

  Don’t Forget, Don’t Diet

  When you bring home your grocery bags full of real food for the first time, expect your dieting instincts to rear their ugly heads. I’ve got so many carbs here, you’ll fret. You’ll momentarily consider the foods you’ve purchased to evaluate which has the lowest amount of fat. But recognize these thoughts for what they are, and push them out of your mind. You have permission not to diet, and to eat wonderful foods again. And once you realize how easy it is to shop for real foods and taste how delicious they are, you honestly won’t miss the dieting approach of scrutinizing the RDA microfiche on the back of the little boxes.

  Remember, too, that this entire luscious lifestyle approach exchanges high quantity for high-quality foods. So when you shop, buy the best you can find, just get less of it. You’ll be just as satisfied, you’ll have better nutrition, and you’ll lose weight in the process.

  I want you to notice how your physiology responds to this French approach—not only with increased energy levels and lower weight, but also in the kinds of foods your body begins to crave. A wonderful benefit of eating real food again is that you begin to lose your need for oversweetened junk foods. Your tastes acclimate to the higher quality.

  In fact, the next step on this path shows you how your transformation of tastes occurs, and how this one change creates a lifetime of optimal health.

  PEOPLE ON THE PATH

  Dear Will,

  I just want to say that your book has changed my life! I have gone from a size 24/26 to a 6. That’s right—a size SIX. I am just under 5’4” and used to weigh 235 pounds. Right now, I weigh 130 pounds.

  I have struggled with my weight all my life and feel as if I’ve found the ultimate answer to my struggles. I basically began incorporating changes that fit well with my family life, my budget, and my personal preferences. For instance, you will never catch me drinking soda (I think I’d throw up!) or eating a low-fat food product (normal fat all the way for me).

  By the way, I am a thirty-one-year-old, stay-at-home mother of four children and my weight loss is the talk of the town. People I run into who haven’t seen me in a while hardly recognize me. I began eating this way in August 2003 and I plan to do this for the rest of my life. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but THANK YOU for creating your eating plan. I think it probably saved my life.

  All of the changes I made are from following your advice.

  Thanks again,

  Joy H

  CHEAT SHEET: FABULOUS FOODS

  Make a fresh beginning. This new introduction of real foods is the biological jump start your body has been asking for. Go to the store and refill your cabinets with the healthy choices that give you the best possible nutrition and the best possible shot at lifelong health.

  You still have to read labels, but not for fats, carbs, and proteins. Instead, you’ll be looking for real foods with real ingredients. Get used to shopping for:

  Organic veggies

  Organic meats

  Normal dairy products

  Packaged foods that are 100 percent natural

  The Results You’re Looking For

  IMMEDIATELY

  You’ll notice the dramatic improvement in the flavor of your foods.

  You will look forward to dinner.

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS

  You’ll have mapped out the real foods in your grocery store and shopping will be a breeze.

  WITHIN A MONTH

  The real foods you’re choosing will seem perfectly normal, and the faux foods you used to eat will taste bizarre by comparison.

  HOMEWORK: FINDING THE FAUX IN YOUR HOUSE

  Map the grocery store.

  Learn which aisles have real foods in them.

  Learn which aisles do not.

  Try organic meats and judge the difference for yourself.

  Get organic veggies whenever you can.

  Taste test the difference between organic milk and chemically treated milk.

  Step 3

  Lose Your Sweet Tooth (While Eating Real Chocolate)

  At ten years old, my son Ben was already a discriminating individual with a very secure sense of WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?”). So when we said we were going to live in France for a while (and he shrugged), I had to arm myself with the full parental arsenal of reasons why living in this other culture would be so cool.

  What a failure. None of it worked: culture (whatever), a new language (major yawn), and the “exciting adventure” even sounded lame to me the moment it came out of my mouth. But what finally changed his little teen-wanna-be brain was food. Not just any food. Chocolate.

  “Ben,” I intoned, “you know, they eat chocolate croissants for breakfast.” Now that got his attention. He squinted, digesting this little mental anomaly. Surely there must be some trick, some broccoli laced within, or some other suffering-induced builder of character.

  “Chocolate? For breakfast?”

  There it was. The opening. The French were potentially cool, so I used ever so little parental license and pushed the truth envelope. “Yeah, um, I think they have it every day!” I knew I had him when he finally started with the gentle bobble-headed movements he makes when he’s on board with you. We had him.

  Okay, the French don’t have chocolate for breakfast every day, but you can pick up a pain au chocolat any morning you and
your parents like! This particular fact really hits hard on another version of the French paradox (there are so many). “The French eat those croissants, those chocolates! How can they have all these sweet foods without their insulin levels (and weight) going through the roof?”

  But if you’ve ever stopped at a local French bakery and picked up a croissant, you know that they’re far less sugary than buttery. The chocolate is mostly darker and richer, without so much sugar, and the yogurts don’t contain buckets of corn syrup either. By the way, there’s no equivalent to the milk shake macchiato “coffee” drinks we have here.

  In fact, the French can eat those wonderful breads, chocolates, and pastries precisely because they aren’t spiked with so much sugar. It’s not dumped in there because they just don’t have the insatiable taste for it like you find in other (heavier) cultures. Isn’t that a coincidence? They don’t have our cultural sweet tooth or our cultural weight problems.

  Our taste for more and more sugar in our foods is a basic craving that reflects how much you want. But that much sweetness in food spins your body out of control and into weight and health problems by producing disordered eating. In this step, you’ll get the tools to regain control over your cravings again.

  The first place to start is with sugar. We eat piles of it, particularly in processed food products. We’re saturated with it. The USDA reported that Americans eat twice the maximum sugar they should be getting from their diets—about twenty teaspoons every day! Of course, much of this is hidden in all the fake food products out there—practically all fat-free and processed foods have some form of corn syrup in them.

  Your goal to eat like the French: Cut sugar consumption by half by changing your taste for it, not by cutting sugar out of natural foods.

  Here’s where the loss of control comes in. People say they eat sugar because they crave it. In other words, because they have a sweet tooth. And that sweet tooth calls them and nags them for sugary treats. But this confuses cause with effect. The sweet tooth didn’t create the consumption of sweets, the consumption of sweets created the tooth.

  This point is easier to understand by thinking of an addict of any stripe. Addicts seek out their fix because they crave it, but they crave it in the first place because they used it. Your body naturally gets used to the inputs you give it—Ding Dongs and Jolly Ranchers all day long, let’s say. It responds by expecting that threshold level of sweetness until you change the baseline.

  Fortunately, losing your sweet tooth is easy to do, by removing the excess sugar in your life. I’m not talking about eliminating carbs or healthy fruits with natural sweetness, but those products with additive sugars. This one simple habit will tone down the sensitivity of your taste for sugar, so you just won’t want so much anymore.

  Right now, you have a sense of the sweetness that certain foods carry. Some, like a chicken breast, are not sweet at all. Some have a little sweetness, like bread (the enzymes in your mouth break down the complex carbs into simple carbs, and you taste a subtle sweetness). Then there’s dark chocolate, fruits like bananas, milk chocolate, sweeter fruits like peaches, and on up to sodas and candy.

  All the way from “not sweet at all” to “makes me gag,” your personal assessment is related to the relative size of your sweet tooth. If it’s large, you’ll taste syrupy soda and think it tastes normal. If your tooth has been just about pulled out, you’ll taste that very same soda and be overwhelmed by the sugar concentration. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to move your taste for sugars from point A to point B.

  And here’s the message of hope. Many people really believe they’re controlled by their urges, and driven to bad eating habits by their tastes for certain foods. But you can set your sweetness sensitivity anywhere you want.

  For example, when my daughter Grace was in third grade, I gave her elementary school teachers a series of PATH Healthy Weight Loss seminars from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day, to show them that you really can lose weight, even through the eating frenzy of the holidays.

  One of the teachers was a Pepsi-aholic, and drank 3 or 4 cans per day. For a hundred health reasons, she was finally convinced to kick the habit and give soda up for good. She stopped cold turkey.

  Three weeks later, she came to the course with a personal revelation. “Dr. Clower, I was home the other day. My son was sitting at the computer with a bag of Hershey’s kisses right right beside him—open. I went over to chat and absentmindedly stuck my hand in the bag and pulled out one as we talked. After I finished that piece of chocolate, I was ‘sweeted out.’ I didn’t want any more! Three weeks ago, I would have had ten of those things without even blinking.”

  This woman lost her sweet tooth in three weeks by making one basic change that reduced her sugar consumption. Three weeks later, her tolerance for sweetness had dramatically dropped as her sensitivity to sugary tastes increased. And the most important fact is that she’s now doing all the right things for all the right reasons.

  Now she’s making healthy food decisions based on what she loves.

  Now she’s controlling calories based on her taste and instincts.

  Now she’s living the French lifestyle that produces low weight for her, even when she’s not thinking about it.

  And just like the French people, she no longer has to agonize about her diet, calculate fat grams as a percentage of total calorie consumption, or stew over the number of hydrogens saturating the fatty acid chains of her mashed potatoes. And the best part is that she did this herself, and knows how to do it again if she ever needs to. She’s empowered to control her own cravings so she can live a healthy, enjoyable life.

  When you see the naturally thin French people eat pleasantly without overconsumption, realize that you really can do that, too. You can get there through your own behaviors and choices because you can change what your body craves. You’re in control of this aspect of your life.

  Remember, the point is not just about calories or carbs or even your weight! You’re cutting the sugar to regain control over your cravings, so that your natural tendency is toward optimal health. Once you do this, you change your relationship with food, enjoy it more, and (as a wonderful consequence) you lose weight.

  The Sweet Tooth Test

  To lose your sweet tooth, you first have to get a sense of how intense it is right now. Once you have a measurement, you can watch your sugar craving changes over time. That’s where the sweet tooth test comes in—it’s a quick test and I advocate taking it once a week for the next two months.

  The Test

  What you need:

  5 small cups, all of the same size

  Corn syrup (Karo or another kind) or sugar

  A notebook to track your results

  Get your five small cups and fill each two-thirds full with water. The size of the cups doesn’t matter. Just make sure they’re the same cups you use every time you take this test. The first cup will be a reference cup, and contain only water.

  Next add the sweetener to cups 2 through 5 as follows:

  Stir in ½ tablespoon corn syrup or sugar to the water in the second cup.

  Stir in 1 tablespoon corn syrup to the water in the third cup.

  Stir in 2 tablespoons corn syrup to the water in the fourth cup.

  Stir in 3 tablespoons corn syrup to the water in the fifth cup.

  Testing: When you’re ready, first take a sip of water from the reference cup. Then taste the sweetened water in the first cup and assess two things on the table below: its sweetness level on a scale from 1 to 10; and (yes or no) whether this level of sugar is intolerable (induces the gag reflex you get when you’ve had too much sugar). Write this value down on the table you create from the example we’ve provided.

  But before moving on to the next concentration of syrup, sip the cup of plain water to clear your taste buds. Then continue on in that manner, making your way up the concentration gradient until you get to the last one, or until you get to the cup that’s just too sweet for you
.

  A Tooth Table

  Draw your own table to look like this one. For each sugar concentration, judge how sweet it tastes to you on a scale from 1 to 10, and then write it in the Week 1 row of boxes. If you get to the “gag me” level, where it’s just too sweet to stand anymore, mark a big X in that box and those for all the stronger concentrations that follow it.

  For the first week, test for your sweet tooth daily and average that number for the week. For the next weeks, test once per week on the same day each time, and write down the values. Keep in mind that your readings simply reflect the strength of your sweet tooth at that particular nanosecond. Even at that, you’ll still be able to watch your taste for sugar drop over time. Remember, there’s no absolute value that you should shoot for. In fact, the number you get when you do the test is completely arbitrary by itself. It only matters when you see how your sugar tolerance changes over time.

  The Sweet Tooth Test reveals to you how quickly the values drop, as your cravings fade away.

  What about sugar-free diet products? Won’t they lower my sugar cravings?

  Unfortunately, the answer is no. First of all, there are no diet soda bushes or roving herds of sugar-free fat-free puddings, ice creams, or Jell-Os out there. They do not exist outside of the chemical factory and the grocery store. Don’t eat inventions.