The pleasure principle

It is a girl's best diet fantasy -- skip the gym, ignore the low-cal, low-fat aisles at the grocery store and eat, eat, eat. Snack on chocolate, sip champagne and indulge in those flaky, buttery pastries. The catch? Promised weight loss. Well, at least that is what Mireille Guiliano, author of the best selling book, French Women Don't Get Fat (Knopf Publishing, 2005) proposes. Considering that only 11 percent of French people are obese compared to 30 percent of Americans who are 30 pounds heavier than a healthy weight, she just might be on to something.

ELLE Canada sat down with the ever-so-chic and, I daresay, very slim, Guiliano to get the skinny on eating for pleasure, one truffle at a time.

EC: Where did you derive your inspiration from in writing this book?

MG: As a teenager, I went to Massachusetts in America as an exchange student. The food there was very different than what I was accustomed to. In America, they had chocolate chip cookies and brownies like I had never seen. In France, you have ice cream only in the summer months, but in America, you could get it all year round. So I started eating all of the time. With my host family, we'd eat in the car, in front of the T.V, everywhere. It became a vicious circle and one that was very hard to stop. At the end of my time in America as a student, I had gained 20 pounds. When I finally came back to France, my father told me that I looked like a sack of potatoes. I was devestated. Through the course of my tribulation, I met my family physician, whom I now refer to as "Dr. Miracle" who re-introduced me to the French principles of eating. And thus, I lost the weight and began to return to my normal self.

I never really thought I would write anything about diets. With my job in America, I lecture quite a bit on food and wine and women would always come up to me and say, "You're so passionate about food and wine and we always read pieces on you entertaining and dining in New York and Paris. How do you not gain weight?" I would always say that us French have our secrets and one day, someone suggested I write a book about that. The rest, as they say, is history.

EC: At the beginning of your book, you mention that one thing peeople should learn is to be a bit narcissistic while also being a bit hedonistic. What does that mean?

MG: We all have two 'personalities' inside ourselves. One wants to be healthy, slim, beautiful, in 'fashion', while the other side wants to have it all, to live in excess, to indulge every and all pleasures. You have to understand and appreciate that you have both sides. To eliminate one 'personality' is to diet, and we don't want that. Everything is a matter of balance. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it too, just not the whole thing! If I do eat everything, I'll get fat again. I've been there, done that. I was not happy when I was over-weight, no one is. It will reflect on everything else in your life -- your professional life, your personality, everything. The key is moderation. It's that simple.

EC: You make alot of reference to how we in North America are a diet-obsessed culture. We consumer ourselves with the no carbs, high protein, no fat diets and ultimately they fail. Why do you think that is?

MG: Deprivation. When you deprive yourself of certain things, you're eventually going to take revenge on yourself and binge. Diets are deprivation. They are boring and very stressful as more often than not, you are restricted to only a certain type of food and therefore, one type of nutrient.

EC: So there are many more repercussions to going on these types of diets, other than just trying to lose weight. Health-wise, it can be dangerous?