Maintenance Phase - “French Women Don't Get Fat”

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

A dieting book or a how-to guide for an eating disorder? Pourquoi pas les deux ?Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!The By The Book episode The NYT interview with Mireille GuilianoGabrielle Deydier: what it’s like to be fat in FranceInhaling Their FoodPublishers sell snobbery by the pageChampagne and Pizza'French Women Don't Get Fat': Like Champagne for ChocolateThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

This is a very play the hits one. It's one of the few episodes we've done lately that people want to hear. I suppose that's forcing it. That's fine then. What a tribute to the guy who brought you worm wars. Yeah, the numbers on the warming episode are in. They are not good. Listen, I'm thinking about a twinkie defense part two.

Don't worry about this. What do you have for Le Tagline? The tagline this week is just Liberté, Egalité, Garbageier. It feels like we're gonna get real French, and there's gonna be some real trash. I don't know for sure, I don't know this book. It's gonna be problematic. I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I am Michael Hobbs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can get T-shirts, mugs, totes, at T-public. Both of those are linked for you in the show notes. And if you would like to keep listening, we would love to have you. Hello.

Hello. So what do you know about this book, French Women Don't Get Fat? I've just heard the title a bunch of times, it's sort of rolled my eyes at it. I've never picked it up. I don't have it in the Diet Book collection. Okay. I became aware of it at a time in like the 2000s 90s-ish.

There were just a lot of white liberals who were like, Europe really has things figured out. Yes. So there was like a big sort of Europe worship thing happening that I think was mostly about parental leave, you know, vacation time and about fair wages and about workplace kind of stuff and social services kind of stuff, which is not wrong, but that got painted with a very broad brush of like, Europe is better than us in every way. I mean, this was published the year that I moved to Europe,

so I think it was one of those people. I'm like, ooh, the bike lanes. I want to get where the bikes are. So that's my relationship to it. It's just sort of, I'm broadly aware of it. It smells fishy to me. It smells like an old riblochon that has been kept in the closet. The closet? That's the last one. That's the last one, I'm sorry.

You're really out crocodile-dum-dying yourself. I wanted to do like an all-purpose, like it's not quite a content note, but it's more just like, I'm gonna mispronounce everything this episode. I should also give like an actual content warning that like this book is really a how-to guide to have like a pretty worrying eating disorder.

Take care. I went to like the National Eating Disorders website and looked at like the warning signs and and numerous things that she prescribes are actual clinical guidelines for something's up. If that stuff is triggering for you or you just don't want to hear it, very understandable. Go listen to the Warmoor's episode. Be the first one. So the author of this book is named Marais Juliano. She is in her 50s when the book is published. She grows up in rural France. She starts studying English in high school.

She kind of falls in love with the language. She ends up studying abroad in Massachusetts. She moves back to France, goes to the Sorbonne, becomes a UN translator, and moves to New York, where she meets her husband, who's American, and she somehow gets a job at a sort of a champagne trade publication. This was back when journalism was a functioning industry

and people could get jobs. Like a publication about champagne? About the champagne industry. Whoa, all right. It appears that's very short lived though. She becomes the first employee of, are you familiar with the brand Viv Clico? It's like a champagne brand.

Uh-uh. It's a super high-end brand that's owned by Louis Vuitton. Whoa. She ends up working her way up to the CEO. So at the time that she writes this book, she is the CEO of this champagne, high-end champagne company. What a weird turn. You can already tell that we're gonna get a lot of,

like, kind of out of touch advice from, like, a rich lady. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's kind of been wiped from our memories now, but, you know, this book comes out in 2004, and it's, like, a huge sensation. Yeah. This book sold three million copies.

She was featured on Oprah, of course. She was on Good Morning America. She did, like, a like a huge like year-long Press Tour for this and like the number of think pieces about this book and like actually fairly positive reviews of it That I was able to find is really remarkable like this this was not a controversial book when it came out that the discourse around This issue was so different back then and it was just like here's some tips from this French lady and like how to be French It's fascinating to me that in the 90s, we had this very overt and very concerned conversation

about the prevalence of eating disorders. And then in the 2000s, all these diet books came out that were just like full how-to guides on eating disorders. It's fascinating. I know. Like the wildest, most extreme diets followed this period of just like, oh no, it's gone too far. But I think the oh no, it's gone too far,

got pinned to like magazines and models more than like the diet industry or anything else. Yeah. So like a lot of garbage crept through in that time. I also think so much of this comes back to tying eating disorders to a particular way of looking and like a particular outcome. Yeah, absolutely.

Even on this like warning signs of eating disorder stuff that I was reading the last couple of weeks, a lot of it is like you weigh less than, you know, 100 pounds or something. Yeah. It wasn't really focused on like behaviors. Like fat people can also have really worrying

eating disorders and like really worrying like physical symptoms. Right. But not be 85 pounds. Yeah, at the height of my eating disorder, I would say I lost about 80 pounds, maybe more, but in order to qualify for having anorexia nervosa, you have to have an underweight BMI, right? Like I had to be like a fraction,

a fraction of a fraction of my former self, right? In order to like be seen as having a needing disorder. Yeah, nobody's concerned about fat people not getting enough food. I also, I don't know if you remember this, but I remember the wave of similar books that came out after this. So after this became a massive bestseller, there was Japanese women don't get old or fat. Ah! Fuck you, France! There's also one called Mediterranean women's

Stay Slim 2. This is just a bad... Hey guys, don't forget about us! Just we're here! We're also fin! That feels like the no pigeons to the no scrubs of... Like we don't get fat. It's all I could think about.

Estonian women eat in moderation! A lot of people are making a lot of claims about a lot of nationalities ladies, I don't know. Okay, so I am going to send you the first two paragraphs of The book. Oh, we're just going in on the intro, huh? I feel like it's good to get like some flavor Like what what kind of book like how does it feel to read this book? Whatever the state of Franco-American relations Admittedly a bit frayed from time to time. we should not lose sight of the singular achievements of French civilization. Oh, no.

Until now, I humbly submit, one glorious triumph has remained largely unacknowledged, yet it's a basic and familiar anthropological truth. French women don't get fat. I am no physician, physiologist, psychologist, nutritionist, or any manner of iste, who helps or studies people professionally. I was, however, born and raised in France. And with two good eyes, I've been observing the French for a lifetime. One can find exceptions as with any rule, but overwhelmingly, French women do as I do.

They eat as they like and don't get fat. Porcwa. So, this sets the stage for a number of patterns that we're going to see throughout this book. The writing is kind of weird. Like it's not all that well written or like clear what she's saying. She uses a lot of like parenthetical phrases and she just kind of like rambles sometimes.

And she also uses an unbelievable amount of like French phrases in this book for like no particular reason. But Mike, per qu'un. It feels like there was some sort of contractual arrangement where it's like you have to remind them that your French once per paragraph. So it should be like when I was studying in college, I would often do do some French phrases and then in parentheses it would be like walk down the sidewalk. Why?

Why would you not just say what? So what do you think generally about this? I mean, I fucking hate it. Already? Well, listen, this second paragraph is not really doing her any favors. Like, I'm not a doctor, I'm just a person with eyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ma'am. She's very open about the fact that like, this book is just like based on her. Wow. I read this extremely shady feature story on her that was published in the New York Times after this became a bestseller. It says, the book is a confection that she whipped up over summer and fall weekends. It's very easy, she said. There was no research. No, Marais. We know there was no research. Wow. The number of diet books that have like

zero citations. I know. Meanwhile, if you write a book about anything to do with like, maybe dieting isn't the best. Maybe fat people are okay, and we should be nice to them. Like you gotta be cited to the hills. You have to prove the shit out of your case. And I just find this really fascinating to know

that this like massive bestseller was just like, nope, not researching, not- Did read stuff, didn't learn anything first. She also is weirdly open about the fact that this is a book for fellow rich people. Really? This is all from the intro. She says, while my stories and lessons

can be of benefit to anyone, this book is intended primarily for women being based solely on my experience as a woman. It's not only for Americans, but for women throughout the developed world, who face career pressures, personal stress, globalization, and all the traps of 21st century society. And it is not for those whose weight is an immediate health risk or who require a medically prescribed diet. I speak specifically to women who need to lose up to 30 pounds, which is a great proportion of the population. I mean, I think like this feels very similar. I'm getting big Karl Lagerfeld die with vibes.

I was thinking that too, yeah. Right, which is just like this is for rich, thin people to become even thinner. Yeah. On the one hand, I appreciate the candor and directness and sort of directiveness to the audience in the book. On the other, I think that a book like this carries a cultural impact that is way greater than the people who read it with care and comprehend and sort of take in every sense, right? So I appreciate that there's like a directness in there that's like, this isn't for fat people,

but on the flip side, like it then gets out into the world and a bajillion people see it or hear about it and then recommend it to fat people or use it as a way to be shitty to fat people or whatever. I mean, I guess it's better to be direct about this stuff but also that feels weird and itki. Another thing that she is honest about in ways I also feel weird about

is she does not mention health in this book at all. There's no mention of diabetes, there's no mention of heart disease, like all the sort of stuff, like that paragraph that you get in every fucking book that mentions fatness of like the cost to the healthcare system. She doesn't care. Hang on, you know why she doesn't care? Mm-hmm. She doesn't care because she should have written a book called French Women Get Universal Healthcare. You know? She's very open in this book as as Carl Lagerfeld was in his book, that like, this is about being attractive.

That's it. And you hear this from accounts of fat people in France as well, that it's just like, oh, well, you're not attractive to me. And they don't even really, like, people don't even really bother couching it and like, oh, I'm concerned about your heart health or whatever. It's just like, oh, I don't like looking at you. In the same feature story where she talks about how she's like, I'm a wealthy lady and like I didn't do any research for this book,

it says, there is a steely discipline behind her pleasure loving approach. One of the main goals of staying slim is to remain appealing to men. And this is hard work. A Frenchman wants his wife to be very elegant, very thin, she said. It's never said except in the silence. There is pressure. A woman works on herself. No. She's just saying it. It's like, this is to be hot. Who will?

For men. And she also talks elsewhere about, like, to advance in my career, I needed to be thin. Not untrue. Unfortunately, not untrue. So again, it's like these mixed feelings where it's like, yeah, that is what we're talking about. In, like, 95% of conversations about fairness,

we're talking about looks, right? People want to look a certain way. Yeah, I'm having my own moment with this, which is that anytime someone comes to me with the sort of like faux concern or sincere concern based in bullshit, it is always my hope in that moment that they would just be honest with me and themselves

and just be like, I don't like looking at you. Right. And then I could say, why do you need to say that to me? Yeah, that's a you problem. That's not a me problem. Totally. At the same time, what we have here is someone who is just copying to that and going,

and I don't care. I'm just like having a moment of reflection. I'm like, is that really what I wish for? Right. Because like what I want them to, what I really want for them to do is go, oh wait, I'm saying in doing this thing, and I don't wanna be that kind of person.

Right. That's what I'm actually aiming for, and a necessary precondition for that is for them to own their own weird bigotry on this stuff. Well, so, so, what's amazing to me is, is she doesn't remark upon any of these pressures in any kind of normative way. She's just descriptive.

It's like, oh, you have to be thin to work in corporate America. Which like, yeah, you, I mean, on some level, yes, you do. Like, those are real pressures and it would be weird to deny that they exist. And I'm sure that there are people who are like, just eyes wide open are like, I need to be thin to be an executive at this company, right?

I'm sure that there are people like that. But also, like, I would respect people who do that much more if they were like, and it's bullshit. Yes, and also, she is a CEO. I know, that's another thing. Yes, she has a board. Yes, she has public image to keep up. Yes, she has whatever else.

But I'm also like, you are everybody's boss. So there is a version of this book that she could have written that was like, you know what, there's all these pressures and I work my way to the top and then here's everything I did to like dismantle those pressures and make sure they didn't exist anymore, at least in my company. This is the thing that I find so fascinating about diet books in general, is that there's always some level of acknowledgement of anti-fatness. And there is never any comment

on like, and here's what we could do to fix those broken systems. It's just always like, so you got to get on the treadmill and stay on the treadmill. Right. No, it's not, it's fine. We already have weird thoughts on like page seven. So this is the final paragraph of the first chapter. This is a little proto version of, of course, the discourse that is now dominant in diet books. So like, this isn't a diet. Yeah, it's not a diet.

It's a lifestyle change. It's a detox. It's a cleanse. It's a, huh? The answer is never dieting in the American sense, but rather little alterations made steadily over time. So when we do lose the excess weight, not only does the effort seem painless,

the results are much more likely to last. If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life, don't worry, you don't have to sign onto the politics too. Managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living. Oh my God, your body will equalize to its natural proportions. To its natural proportions. I know. I mean, woo! Yeah, this is like king.

It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change. Yeah, and also, this is the clearest articulation of the like, it's easy. Yeah. All we're talking about is we're reconnecting our relationship with food. It's going to turn out to be great, you're going to lose all this weight, and you're going to have like're gonna have a more holistic life. You're gonna rediscover quality ingredients and stuff.

It's, she presents it as a win-win. Right, you're gonna live in a set of a food network show. Exactly. You'll just be surrounded by produce and freshly magically pre-rizzin bread and all that kind of stuff, yes. So now that we've gotten the thesis, I want to take a brief detour to just talk about the fact

that the premise of this book is wrong. I feel like we should at least discuss it. Yeah, acknowledge the existence of fat French people. Yeah, so I looked this up. So at the time of the publication of this book, 55% of Americans on the BMI scale, which is bullshit, all the normal caveats apply, 55% of Americans were overweight or obese, and 35% of French people.

So 55% America, 35% in France, is that nothing like, no, it's a pretty significant difference, but also it's not 100% America and 0% in France, right? Like we're talking about the same phenomenon, but just at different scales, basically. Right, and the publisher's not gonna stand for a title that's like two thirds of French women don't get. That's what I like, but it's not. Really takes the wind out of its sales.

Okay, so now we're gonna dive back into the book. Chapter one is called The Beginning, I Am Overweight. What? Red flag, already in red flag territory. I don't love it. She grows up in France in the 1960s. It doesn't appear that she was a fat kid at all, but when she moves to America on exchange, when she's 16,

she starts gaining weight. And so I am going to send you a excerpt. Okay, for all the priceless new friends and experiences I was embracing, something else altogether, something sinister was slowly taking shape, Jesus. Almost before I could notice, it had turned into 15 pounds more or less, and quite probably more. It was August, my last month before the return voyage to France. I was in Nen Tucket with one of my adoptive families when I suffered the first blow. I caught a reflection of myself in a bathing suit. My American mother, who had perhaps been through something like this before with another daughter, instinctively registered my distress.

A good seamstress, she bought a bolt of the most lovely linen and made me a summer shift. It seemed to solve the problem, but really only bought me a little time. What do you think? Wow, something sinister. This does seem like the sort of the major trauma of her childhood. Another way to say this is,

oh, I didn't realize I was gaining weight, and I learned I was gaining weight. Yeah. That's what happens in this passage. That's another way of saying that. Yeah. Like a moment of recognizing like, that last passage is this author talking exclusively

about our own body and also projecting really intensely powerful messages about what it means to gain weight or to become a fat person, right? Like describing this as like a monster or like the shark in jaws, right? Something else altogether, something sinister was slowly taking shape. Like that is some wild language to use to describe like a very normal human experience of weight fluctuation. Super normal.

That's a thing that lots and lots and lots of people experience. So when you're talking about your own experience and you talk about it in this kind of way, like there's something lurking in the shadows coming for you, that also sends a message to your readers about how they're supposed to think about their own bodies or how you might also be thinking about their bodies, right? So like, this just feels like one of those real powerful moments where I'm like, technically, this has been written in a way, so as to be like, unassailable, right? Like, I'm just talking about my own experience.

And also, the language that's being used here is so powerful, so moralizing and so... Yeah. ...Iki. Wait, wait, wait till you see how much worse it gets. Oh no, oh no. I feel like I'm going classic like wasting my outrage too early. I know I know this is save your energy. Okay, get a protein bar. So because it's the 60s, she takes a boat back to France and she talks about on this journey France. And she talks about on this journey, she's like worried what her French friends are going to say to her when she gets back and they see that she's gained weight. And she says she's been writing them letters, but she hasn't said anything about the weight gain. And she says she deliberately only

sent them photos of her face so that her friends wouldn't see how much weight she's gained. And then she gets to France and her father meets her like at the pier or whatever when the boat pulls up. So this is another excerpt. OK. Since he had not seen me for a whole year, I expected my father, who always wore his heart on his face, would embarrass me, bounding up the gangway for the first hug and kiss. But when I spied the diminutive Frenchman in his familiar beret, he looked stunned.

As I approached, now a little hesitantly, he just stared at me. And as we came near, after a few seconds that seemed endless, there in front of my brother and my American shipmate, all he could manage to say to his cherished little girl come home was, you look like a sack of potatoes. So another way to say that one is, my dad was a real dick about it. his cherished little girl come home was you look like a sack of potatoes. So another way to say that one is, my dad was a real dick about it.

It sucks. Like that's fucking awful. It sucks. And also, holy shit, imagine if he had an actually fat daughter. The way that these books normalize like really terrible treatment of children is really worrying to me because she presents this as almost like a come to Jesus moment.

Like this was, this was the thing that like broke her out of her complacency. She says she spends like the next three days crying. She feels terrible. She's mad that the family's doing this like trip to Paris together and she basically can't enjoy herself. She kind of downplays it. She's like, oh, he didn't mean it to be mean. Like he was never all that tactful. He was just, you know, he was just surprised. And he was expressing his surprise. You're sending a message of like, oh, you know, sometimes people say stuff like this to their kids. And like, no, it's really not okay under any circumstances to speak to your

kid this way. It's terrible. And I think it's really fascinating to me that all of this stuff is offered up in this book as then you just need to die it. Not then you need to talk to your dad about how he talks to you and reconsider what your relationship looks like right now. Or then you write a passage in the book about like this is a totally unacceptable way to talk to your kids and I wish it hadn't had this effect on me, but it did and blah, blah, blah, blah.

There are so many ways to slice this and Diet books when they present moments like this pick the single way that will result in no Accountability for the person or people who are like saying these awful things to people and passing judgment on other folks bodies and so on and so forth Like it's gross and no like reflection no reflection no cause to be like, hmm, should I say this to a child? Yeah, no, no. But then she ends up moving to Paris. Eventually she graduates from high school, moves to Paris starts attending the Sorbonne and she keeps gaining weight after she moves to Paris by herself.

She says, at five foot three, I was now overweight by any standard and nothing I owned fit, not even my American mother's summer shift. I had two flannel ones, same design, but roomier, made to cover up my lumpiness. I told the dressmaker to hurry and hated myself every minute of the day. More and more, my father's faux pas seemed justified. Jesus Christ. So it's like she's clearly internalizing all this like, wait, shame?

Cause like she lives in a really phyphobic society and her dad has really mean. And so it's like she's just feeling kind of like increasingly desperate. And her parents eventually somehow link her up with a doctor in Paris, who is going to help her lose the weight. She doesn't give the doctors real name, but she calls him Dr. Miracle.

Ooh. And the rest of the book is basically like his plan for her. She says like, he relinked me to my essential frinchness or something. But it's essentially just like the diet plan that this doctor put her on when she was 16. This is very carologorfeld diet. It is, it's like, I mean, I think that there's something

really interesting about how many of these books are written by people who were thinned their whole lives and then gained a pretty small amount of weight temporarily and then lost it. And then like immediately to spend the rest of their lives, like this is a woman in her 50s, right? Giving people advice on how they should do it too. Yeah. But that's not the universal experience of fat people. Like a lot of people are just fat their whole lives.

Right. You're how you lost the freshman 15 is not going to make me into a thin person. Right. You and I have talked about sort of this phenomenon of like formerly fat people, but having the capacity to be extremely anti-fat. As strong or stronger are thin people who were once fatter than they wanted to be? Yeah, yeah. For a brief period of time. For a very brief period. Some of the most arrogant and incurious weight loss advice

I get is for people who are like, once I weighed 10 pounds more than this and I took it right off. There are a lot of people who are like, yeah, like I went on vacation for two weeks and I gained 10 pounds and then I came home and I lost it right off. There are a lot of people who are like, yeah, like I went on vacation for two weeks and I gained 10 pounds and then I came home and I lost it and here's how. And you're like, that's not.

Right, it's just like I started going back to the gym and ate the way I was before baking. Right, it's like I just went back to my previous lifestyle. Yeah, totally sure. Okay, so are you ready to hear Dr. Miracles plan? No, God. Step one of this plan is, for the next three weeks,

she is supposed to write down everything she eats. Oh, okay. Her doctor doesn't say that she has to change anything, but just keep a log. Hey, teen with crushing self-esteem issues related to your body. Don't change anything. Just write down what you eat. She also, this is one of the first little, like, little tiny clues that this is going to get weirder as we go along. She says, to know how much you're eating, to know what to write down in

this food diary, you should start weighing all of your food on a kitchen scale. Yeah, this is some old school Weight Watchers nonsense. Exactly. Get out your little scale. Ooh. So that's step one. Step two is to jump start your weight loss. The way you do that is a weekend of eating nothing but leak soup. Ah! 40 hours. This is wild. So far, we've gotten sort of Weight Watchers stuff.

We've gotten a little dash of cabbage soup diet, just a little short crash, cabbage soup diet, but this time with Leaks, so it feels vaguely different. It's very funny in the section of the book, earlier where she talks about like, fat diets don't work. She specifically mentions like the cabbage soup diet. Like, can you believe women in the 70s

were eating cabbage soup? It's like chapter, turn page. It should have been Leaks soup. We all know that So okay, let me send you this fucking leek soup because it sounds absolutely miserable Really? This is the recipe. I love a good vegetable soup and it seems like a thing that would not be hard to make delicious No, look Aubrey

Aubrey Click on the jpeg Click on the jpeg Serves one for the weekend. For the weekend. Ugh. See, clean the leaks. And then you put the leaks in a large pot and cover with water,

bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer uncovered for 20 to 30 minutes, pour off the liquid and reserve, place the leaks in a... What? That's the whole recipe. So you're just drinking leak water? It's a tea. She's making tea out of leeks. Look at the ingredients.

Two pounds leeks, no salt, no butter or olive oil to saute the leeks beforehand. No garlic, even, no nut vices. Wow. You're drinking boiled leeks. Is that, I mean, this is not even meaningfully soup. This is every meme about a crash diet and every meme about white people food all at the same time. All she could do is be like, Cornish with mayonnaise and then it would be like the ultimate white people food.

Like this is unreal. I listen to a podcast called By the Book where both of the co-hosts tried this diet. Both of them were crying. It's quite a good episode. I'll link it in the show notes. So you're essentially just not eating for 48 hours. So you can't really function. And all of the book here, let me send you the section of the text after this. And cry. Pity those who don't love the sweet taste and delicate texture of leaks. Eventually, you probably will. Probably.

This is like a fucking kidnapper. The juice is to be drunk, reheated, or at room temperature to taste. Every two to three hours, one cup at a time. This will be your nourishment for both days until Sunday dinner when you can have a small piece of meat or fish four to six ounces, don't lose that scale yet, with two vegetables steamed with a bit of butter or olive oil and a piece of fruit. Both versions are so good and such an adventure for most palettes that you will have a hard time seeing them as prison rations. What the f- who's what? So it's like this is just fully deranged. Like it's just a weekend read, I feel like absolute shit. Also, there's

no such thing as jump starting weight loss. Any doctor, any diet plan, anything that tells you about kick starting weight loss or like get hit the ground running or something. This is not how bodies work. All that happens in this weekend where you're eating nothing but leek soup. The both of the cohosts of this podcast loss, I think one of them lost three pounds, one of them lost four and a half pounds. Like, yeah, you lose weight when you don't eat anything. You know this from when you can't keep food down.

Exactly. So this is not any magic going on here, but you gain 100% of the weight back within like another two days as soon as you return to eating normally. Like a lot of that's water weight that just like comes right back on. This is not meaningful weight loss. So all you're doing is you're setting yourself up for failure. There's no, there's no point in doing this. So then after you've done this, the goal of the next three months, this is called recasting, is to relentlessly go through your food diary

and to look at all of the little cuts that you can make. For her, it was that she was walking to school and she often didn't have time in the mornings to make breakfast so she would grab like a pastry on the way to school and then she would grab like a pastry on the way home from school. So for her, it was like, okay, those are the cuts that I can make I'm eating these unhealthy pastries, I should start making breakfast at home.

So she starts out, it's like, okay, the chocolate that you're eating at midnight, cut that out, whatever. This is fairly standard advice in these kinds of books. But then she also says that when you find things that you want to keep in your life, things that really do bring you pleasure, that aren't extraneous or that you don't feel bad about the next day, she says what you should do is start reducing them incrementally. So she says like if you're drinking juice, you know, juice has calories in it, so you should start diluting it with water. So that's sort of like her metaphor for like cut out the things that aren't really giving you pleasure

And then the things that are giving you pleasure just kind of make them worse. Yeah, totally make them less pleasurable Yeah, she says over time you'll discover what is obvious to French women There can be an almost ecstatic enjoyment in a single piece of fine dark chocolate that a dozen Snickers bars can never give you. On that subject, please also eliminate all chocolate loaded with cornstarch, corn syrup, artificial flavoring, artificial coloring, and too much sugar. So again, she's just basically telling you to eat less. Right, it's like if you enjoy chocolate,

did you know that you can actually just eat one square of dark chocolate? This is the Oprah, I love bread, ad. Everything in moderation, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it sounds reasonable at first, and it's like, okay, we're gonna cut your life down to things that really give you pleasure. It's like a Marie condo, right?

This brings me joy, right? We wanna reconnect ourselves with the joy of food. And then it's like a couple paragraphs later, she's like, but even the things that bring you joy, you should just eat less of that. Then get rid of those two, yeah. Right. You're reducing everything to as little as possible. Yeah. Like I don't think this is like the way that French people eat. Right. The marketing of the book is like we're reconnecting with food. How can I eat like butter and pastries and all this

stuff and like still lose weight. But then once you actually get into the meat of the book, she's like, eat less of this. Eat half the pastry. Yeah, and then eat less than that. And then eat less than that. Yeah. There is this sort of concept of eating disorders that is just like one day a person, usually a young white woman wakes up and is just consumed with the desire to be thin

and will do anything to become as thin as possible. I'm sure that is some folks' experience that it's just like, something happens. It's like a bolt of lightning. They're all in, for me, it was absolutely a slow slide like this. That was like, oh, I cannot eat until 11 a.m. What if I could make it until 1 p.m.?

What if I could eat until 4 p.m.? What if I could make it until 7 p.m.? Right? This kind of like, gamifying and narrowing and narrowing and narrowing and narrowing was the nature of my eating disorder. Right. So to see someone spell all of that out as recommendations

is really intense. Yeah. To be like, then you should do this. And I'm like, I did that and it was bad. So I mean, this is what's incredible to me. The rest of this chapter is basically just a list of varying degrees of eating disorder behavior. So she says that her doctor's first tip for her was because she's eating these pastries too and from school.

He told her to not bring enough money with her to buy pastries at school. So it's like only bring enough with you for the train ride and like maybe a cup of coffee at school, which is like, this is an era, you know, before credit cards and stuff. So it's like she literally just like, doesn't have money when she's at school all day. He also says that she should walk a different route to school every day so that she's not tempted

because she's smelling the pastries. So then she wants to go in and buy one. He says that she should only go to the store and do shopping for like one to two days, which I don't know, I kind of do that, but that's mostly out of laziness. But he says that she should only buy what she needs for like a couple of days,

basically so that she doesn't have any food in the house. He tells her to give up processed foods because she doesn't know what the portions are, right? It's harder to weigh something at a restaurant whereas you can weigh it at home. And then she has this whole thing throughout the book of using different plates. So it's like if you're having like chicken and cauliflower,

you shouldn't have the two foods on the plate at the same time you should eat the chicken on a plate. What? And then you should go and get a new plate, serve up the cauliflower in like a nice presentation way, and then you should go and get a new plate, serve up the cauliflower in like a nice presentation way, and then eat the cauliflower. You shouldn't be eating two things at the same time. Why? She literally has a section called ritual eating, just like one of the signs of eating the food. Oh god. It says eat only at the table, only sitting down. Never eat out of the cartons.

Use real plates and decent napkins if you have them to emphasize the seriousness of the activity. Eat slowly, chew properly. Do not watch television or read the paper. Think only about what you are eating, smelling, and savoring every bite. Cheese. She has a whole thing on portion control, she says, as a rule, half a pound of anything in one sitting is too much. Cut back gently, especially if your problem is too much of a good thing. Salmon is wonderful health food, but if you need to have half a pound to feel content, you need too much. Keep the scale handy and reduce ounce-by-ounce until four to six ounces seems like a satisfying amount to you. So like, you're ritualizing, you're eating, you're monitoring your own eating, you're thinking about food all the time, right? I can't walk to school the same way I walked there yesterday, so I don't get a pastry, and when I'm at school,

I'm probably fucking starving, because I don't have any food that I can buy, like I only have this thing that I weighed out meticulously, that I can eat. It's just like this amount of fixation on food is like really worrying. Yeah, we're in full eating disorder territory. And then she ends the chapter with a recipe, there's a lot of recipes in this book, most of which kind of look okay on the surface.

So the recipe that she ends the chapter with is like a crustless apple tart, which like whatever, an apple tart with a crust, like I make a quiche with a crust all the time, because crust is like the pain in the ass of making quiche is the crust. Yeah, it's just scrambled eggs in a pan. It's great. It whips, yes.

So she wants you to like cut up four apples, right? And put them in like a tart pan, normal fine. Four apples, she uses one tablespoon of sugar. Huh, this tart serves four. It's got one tablespoon of sugar. Right. She four. It's got one tablespoon of sugar. Right. She also tells you, I cannot believe this. She tells you to serve it on cabbage leaves.

Ah! Instead of the crust. What kind of dystopian nightmare? She says there, you don't have to eat them if you don't want to and they're for decoration. What? It sounds like it would like look like shit. They's like, burp cabbage leaves.

Watch Top Chef, ma'am, Inetable Garnishes, not welcome. I know. Now I feel much clear on this. She's just on a mission to ruin food. That's the thing. What if food was bad, but you could have as much of it as you want?

So the next, this is the first three months. This is like the recasting, right? And then we get to the maintenance phase, the sort of for the rest of your life rules basically. I'm guessing they're reasonable, followable, and scientifically proven. I didn't say it's scientifically proven. So again, it's the same sort of thing

where it's basically just like relentless restriction. One of her like main things that she goes back to is always eating three square meals a day, like only, like never have a snack. She says, never be hungry. I mean, that's absurd because obviously you're hungry because you're like, you've already cut things back. Yeah, what are you talking about? But what she means by this is never skip meals, because then you're just gonna end up eating more of the next meal, she also has a whole thing where she's like, it's okay to have a cheat day, right? If you're out with friends, you know, don't be a weirdo,

you can like eat what everybody else is eating. But then she immediately says like, because you're gonna compensate for it tomorrow. Yeah. She says, it's simply a matter of taking from Peter to PayPal. When you add an indulgence, make a corresponding reduction to compensate. Add another half hour of walking the next day.

Skip the cocktail. Pass the bread basket. Just as you become a tune to where your greatest pleasures come from, you will also have to come to know which compensations work best for you. Jesus Christmas! So you're eating normally around your friends, and then the next day you're like, ruthlessly restricting yourself to compensate.

So like, you're kind of hiding your disorder from your friends is basically what that amounts to. Which is, part of having an eating disorder for a lot of people is like hiding it. Or like going out walking for hours the next day to burn it off and feeling guilty about it, right? Oh lord. This sucks. This fucking sucks dude. Breaking. A real radical conclusion on maintenance phase. This is bad and people shouldn't do it. Don't read this book.

So the only saving grace of this book. So this book is 273 pages long. The copy that I have. God. At this point in the book, we are on page 71, right? We've gotten her personal story. We've gotten her tips for the first three months, her tips for maintaining this for the rest of your life.

The rest of the book is filler. Like, there is nothing else. We are like a quarter of the way into the book. Oh my God. The rest of the book is like, there's chapter titles, but it's basically just like how to do food like a French person. Wow.

She has this whole thing about like how to shop at the market and she tells us a bismely boring anecdote about she wants to surprise her husband because he's flying in from Paris, but she has to work the next day and she doesn't have time to cook and she wants to get him his favorite breakfast so she goes to the market and and she's looking at melons,

and then she's talking to the melon person about ripeness, and then she buys a melon when it's not ripe, but then two days later, when he arrives, it is ripe, and it's the perfect breakfast. What? And it's like, yeah, I know how ripeness of food works. I don't know why you're telling me about this. My last week, I got an avocado and it was like hard as a rock.

And then I just left it on the counter for a couple of days and then it was perfect. Good story, Aubrey. Beginning, middle, and riveting. I was tempted to like read you a bunch of excerpts from this because like I cannot convey to you how fucking boring like three quarters of this book is, it's not even like eating disorder or like diet tips.

It's literally she has a whole thing on spices and she's like cinnamon is good in desserts but also they use it in like Moroccan cooking for main courses. And you're like right, that's, are you, you're just telling me about spices now? This is just a Wikipedia entry on cinnamon. Cardamom's real good.

If you put it in the pie crust, you're never gonna eat again. You know what? Interesting. Cool facts. She's like a whole fucking chapter where she explains the concept of soup. She's like, it can be a starter. Or it can be part of the main. Or it can be a side for like a meat dish.

Right, Maray. I've had soups. I'm familiar with the concept of soups. I feel like I get how soup works, lady. It's so weird. And then she has a lot of recipes. And I don't, I mean, I don't think editors like test these recipes.

Most of the recipes are fucking trash. Oh my God. Mike, we're entering my favorite part of every diet book, which is absolute garbage recipes. It's incredible. I love them so much. Give me your wildest. Listen to the fucking Ratatouille recipe. Okay.

So first of all, it's Ratatouille that serves 12, which is like just a lot of fucking Ratatouille. That's a lot of slicing. It's three pounds tomatoes, three pounds zucchini, three pounds eggplant, two tablespoons of olive oil. No! Four nine pounds of vegetable. A full, eggplant.

I know. Famously the most absorbent vegetable. Exactly. You can use that shit as paper towels if you ran out. So this is just like dry vegetables. She basically says put all nine pounds of this, like chop it up, put it in a pan, and then just put it on low heat for two and a half hours.

I think it's baby food. I think we're in baby food territory. It's just gonna be much to a bait. She basically says that like it comes out like a soup. She also says you shouldn't put salt on your food because it makes you retain water and like look fatter, even if you aren't fatter, so we can't have that. So you're not even salting these fucking vegetables.

It just sounds really awful. And again, you're basically eating vegetable water. You're not adding fat or salt or sugar for reasons that she has explained, but she hasn't explained why there's no spices in anything. Why would you not put just a fucking pinch of cinnamon in that apple tart? So now you're also just opposed to flavor

because of its flavorful, then you'll want to eat it and you shouldn't want to eat it. This whole section is just completely deranged. She has stuff about like you should laugh more. She has a lesson on yawning. So like it's important to yon. What? I mean, it's not instructions for an eating disorder.

So I'm like, you know what, Mare, fine. Sure, man. Tell me yon. I don't know. Great. She's obsessed with yogurt and she says, you have to make your own yogurt because all the brands that you buy at the store

have a bunch of additives in them, which is not true. But whatever, I'm sure homemade yogurt is better than the store bought stuff. I bet it tastes but whatever. Like, I'm sure homemade yogurt is better than the store-bought stuff. I bet it tastes delicious, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it's great. She has detailed instructions on how to make your own yogurt. With or without a yogurt maker, which is fairly impressive. She's also, she's the CEO of a champagne brand.

So obviously, she has like 40 pages of like how champagne is like the special thing that like makes you happier and like friendships, whatever. It's like her extoll that like makes you happier and like friendships, whatever. It's like her extolling the virtues of fucking champagne for like page upon page. It's very weird to me. I read a lot of reviews of this book. Like very few people mention the fact that it's like at least three quarters, just nothing. It's just like it's the experience of like going over to your friend's house for the holidays or something, and you sit next to their weird aunt, and she just has ideas about stuff,

and a bunch of weird advice to give you, and most of it's fairly harmless, and you're just like, okay, I'm just gonna listen to this person babble on. Like, at this point, you're just describing me. It's like a weird aunt, he's like around. I'm supposed to make a podcast with this woman. Yeah.

At one point, she lists the restaurants that she goes to in Paris. She's like, I love oysters. When I'm in Paris, I go to like, la oysters. La oysters, not the name. Nailed it. It really feels like this book was not edited. And it really has.

Yeah. It does have the sense of like, I wrote this on the weekends. Of just like, I think soup is really great. These are my favorite kinds of soups. I like the soups with no flavor or ingredients. Right. Oh my God. But then, I mean, in between the lines,

what you're getting is, this is a woman who can basically sit down on a weekend and write 140 pages about food. And wine, and the place that she likes to eat, and the farmer, like specific farmers markets and the place that she likes to eat, and the specific farmer's markets in Provinces that she likes going to. But then all of her actual advice is this way to deny herself pleasure.

It seems that she spent her life constantly thinking about this. Yeah, in some ways I do wonder about this whole diet book being a letter to her dad. Oh, I did it. Look how much I did it. I did it so much. Do you know what I mean?

Like that stuff stays with people. Those experiences of body policing and unwanted comments and like judgments. Yeah. I often wonder this one. I'm reading diet books is like how much of this is you continuing to differentiate yourself from either fat people, which is like all of them are that and or from some past bad experience of feeling like

someone else was judging your body to be like, no, I did it the most. I'm the best at being thin. I'm the best at avoiding these judgments and you can't get me now because I did it perfectly. Right. I'm the best at avoiding these judgments and you can't get me now. Because I did it perfectly, right? I have a lot of compassion for it and that unleashes a whole new wave of garbage people doing garbage things, right? What I was really struck by reading this

was how desperate people are for this stuff that somebody can basically spend decades of their life denying themselves one of their primary pleasures just so that they can stay thin. That's how much of a hold this stuff has on our society, like an individual would do this and would effectively just live with deprivation. She talks about you have to make yogurt the night before. She makes sure to drink a huge glass of water

30 minutes before she eats every time. She goes for a walk before breakfast. She lives on the 15th floor of some building in New York and she often takes the stairs up. She talks about like making her own copies so that she has an excuse to get up and walk around during the day. She's thought about this every single day for her whole life. And she's essentially prescribing this as like,

this is what you should do. Yeah, this is how you should live your life. Right. Once you really get down to it, it's just, this is a calorie restriction diet that you're on for the rest of your life. Right. She's not counting calories, but it is very intensely about restricting. Calories by restricting high calorie foods and by restricting kind of all foods. Just eat that leek water. And staying thin should almost become this like part-time job that you have.

Right? It's this thing that like occupies so much of your time, she says like you should only eat out on special occasions, you should always eat in. I mean, I could list 50 more of these. It's just like the ways that she has adjusted her life to remain thin. If you're not eating out and you're only eating in, like eating out is often a social activity.

Right, that may also mean for her that she's like restricting her social opportunities, or that that's what she's recommending to other people, or that that's how other people are taking it. You can't be around other people when food is present, which is many of the times that we gather together as humans, there is food present. This is calling for not just a reorganization of the foods that you eat, but a reorganization of your life and your connections to other people. And it just is so bizarre to market this level

of restriction and judgment and everything else as like easy breezy. You're gonna love the food. It's all the leak water you can eat. Yeah, and just like soggy apples with like no butter or sugar on them. It's just like hot apples. So the conclusion of the book, the final chapter, there's more and more of this stuff. She has a whole chapter on like parenting advice, which I was ready for that to get real

bad, but it's actually not that bad. The only thing that I liked about the argument that she makes through the book is that Americans have kind of a toxic relationship with food, and especially the way that we talk about food. She says that Americans have this thing where everyone's constantly talking about the diet that they're on. I hate my body.

I shouldn't have eaten that. I feel bad about it. The connection between sin and consumption is something that just runs through every conversation in American life and she's like, it's weird to talk about food this way. Like food is good. Right, talk about food freely and openly and joyfully

and then eat in a restricted joyless painstaking. Exactly, I mean, she doesn't live by this rule at all. No, it doesn't sound like it. So that's basically the book. It's just like 70 pages of like how to have an eating disorder. And then 150 pages of just like, here's what food in France is like. Here's where cinnamon comes from.

Exactly. Great. Wow. It's such a bummer that this was such a huge hit. I do think it's actually worth talking about like the reception to the book and the kind of aftermath of the book. Yeah. After it became a really big deal,

there were some interesting rebuttals to the book. So there was one in the New York Times in 2005 where the author says, when I was a college student in France for a year, I also picked up a bad habit, a pack of cigarettes a day. That's what you do in Paris. Sit in cafes drinking coffee and smoking. I acquired a newly-sfelt figure

not from chewing slowly through four-course dinners, sucking on oysters or setting out fine china at every meal. The regime, from say I learned, was cigarettes. And it took me 15 years to quit, Merci Boquet. Wow. The rates of smoking between America and France are not that different. Friends, people like 5% higher smoking rates. What's interesting about France is that smoking habits run through the economic ladder.

So in America, it's mostly poor people who smoke. Whereas in France, it's everybody. And so the argument that they make in this piece is basically that like, yeah, the thin rich women with like nice scarves that you see in Paris are not thin because they're following this advice, they're thin because they're smoking. There's also been a huge backlash to this kind of eat like a French person thing. In the form of like pointing out that France is extremely fat phobic. In 2017, there was a memoir called,

You're Not Born Fat by a writer named Gabrielle D'Eye. She talks about how, I mean, there's still this practice in France where when you apply for jobs, you send in a photo of yourself. What? Yeah, this is something that I've seen in, when I lived in Denmark, this was normal

and Germany, this is normal. This is fairly standard practice. This is normal. Like this is fairly standard practice across much of Europe. It's something that like when I talk to Europeans about it, I want to tear my fucking hair up because they're all like, well, why wouldn't you send a photo? And like the only reason to send a photo would be to like rule out people with heads curves, people that are not white, people who are fat. Like, what are their purposes there for this?

I mean, to my mind, this is just like, open the floodgates for racism in particular. Yeah. And along the way, no fatties. The problem with this is that size, base discrimination is actually illegal in France, which is good. But because you have to send in your photo

with your fucking job application, you don't get to the interview stage. Right, totally. Gabrielle Didier, the woman who wrote this memoir, she got a job at a preschool, she was teaching autistic kids, and the first day at school, she had a really fat phobic boss,

and there were six kids in the class, and when she showed up, her boss said, oh, we have seven handicapped people with us today. Wow. Right, and she was eventually fired from this job for, quote unquote, failing at her job duties, her job duty being to lose the weight because her boss wanted her to be thinner.

So she loses the job. And the interview with her in the Guardian takes place at a fucking youth hostel because she lost her job and she can't afford her apartment anymore. So she has to move into a youth hostel. I mean, this is all awful. And it also feels like such a weird, it's really interesting to me that when folks marginalize fat people, the things that they reach for, one of the key

things that they reach for is like considering them to be disabled. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's a fascinating and truly garbage tactic that both leaves fat people feeling like shit and also invites people into weird shitty ableist arguments about like, no, I'm not for these reasons rather than being like, okay, how about you just be more chilled to like disabled people? What else do we learn from Gabrielle? Well, also just, I mean, like everybody else who talks about this, I read a bunch of articles

about her and they all, they're like fat discrimination against fat people is like a very well-documented problem in France, but also, Oh, peace of the use, link to heart disease and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like all the boring health shit, and it's just like, that's not, that's not really what she's saying. That's not really the issue that we're talking about here. Like, no one is losing their job because they're fucking LDL cholesterol levels. It really feels like people think it's like bloody Mary, where like you say it three times, and she will appear, right?

Or something. If you just say like, hey man, be nice to fat people, and you don't also say, also it's terrible. It's a bad thing to be. It's really bad for you. It's bad for our country.

It's bad for the world. Somehow a bunch of people are magically gonna get super fat out of nowhere. Yeah, it's the same thing we see with trans people. We're like, what if we're too nice to trans people? Let's dial it back. And you look at any statistics. And it's like, we're not that nice to trans people as a society.

It's the same thing of like, isn't this too much grace to show to fat people? Like yeah. Yeah, totally. It's bad that she lost her job and she's like now living in a youth hostel and everything. But what is her resting heart rate? Let's talk about the downsides of human dignity. Why are we doing this? What if we could have a conversation about shitty behavior targeting fat people and just

let that be a conversation about shitty behavior without going, well, but also it's really bad for you. Right. And what if we could talk about conditions in other countries without boiling it down to these one-dimensional individual behaviors? Yeah, like we keep getting these books. French women don't get fat and Japanese women don't get old

and Albanian women don't get fine lines and wrinkles. And it's like every single time people really want to draw out these like lifestyle things from it. It's like, oh, you should eat more olive oil. They're like, oh, you should bike to work or whatever it is. And like, it would be really easy to make the case that French people are healthier than Americans. Like, French people have longer lifespans.

They have lower infant mortality rates. You could easily make that case. But then whenever somebody tries to make that case, it's like, and that's why you should eat salads. Are like these really silly, life hacky, one weird trick kinds of tips. And it's like, no, if we're interested in the reasons why some populations

are more healthy than others, it's gonna come down to stuff like healthcare access and inequality and stress. But it's like, are we interested in health or are we only interested in our own health? Yeah, and like, what would it look like to do that kind of more global thinking? No, no, no, we don't do that.

We just get right back down to individual level stuff. In part, because those are all the messages we're being fed all the time, right? In part because that's how media covers it. In part because that's how diets market themselves. It is a really frustrating thing to be like, we could be having a much more nuanced and fruitful and productive conversation.

And we are refusing that at every turn. Wait, wait, I have one, I have one, I have a singer, I have a singer. Oh, tell me a singer. I can hear the theme music in the background I have to I have to go back. We think we're getting intellectual debate but in fact all we're getting is leak water. It's totally leak water. Right. ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ‍ʻ� Thank you.