The French Don't Diet Plan

by Dr. William Clower

  Get your nutrition from your food, not supplements. Pills are for sick people.

  The Results You’re Looking For

  IMMEDIATELY

  You will remember how wonderful natural foods taste.

  You will realize how much more satisfying natural foods are than their faux-food counterparts.

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS

  You will find that you have more energy through the day.

  WITHIN A MONTH

  You will no longer crave your carbonated soft drinks.

  You will find that you can’t go back to old faux-food standards.

  HOMEWORK: WHERE TO FIND THE FAUX

  Clean out your pantry.

  Clean out your refrigerator.

  Use the list of faux ingredients to make sure these chemicals are gone for good.

  Step 2

  Choose Fabulous Foods

  When you jettison faux foods for their fabulous real food equivalents, you discover a world of flavor you didn’t even know was there. Suddenly the joy of eating makes an indelible impact, and you become aware of flavor as you never were before. Loving your food again puts eating and the meal itself back into the context in which it belongs.

  For example, in a recent article in Marie Claire magazine, an American woman was put on a typical French diet and a French woman on an American diet, and their progress was followed for just two weeks. I was asked to provide the eating rules for each. The short story is that the American who followed the French diet lost weight and the French woman who ate like Americans gained weight. But more interesting was what happened after it was all over.

  The American woman, Melanie, had just finished with the French diet of real food every day and was invited to a friend’s Super Bowl party. She was ready for the works: chips and salsa, buffalo wings, mini pizzas. As she put it, after piling her plate: “I snag a seat on the couch, bring a salsa-fied chip to my lips … and spit it into my napkin. Yuck!

  “Wait a minute, I tell myself, this can’t be right. I choke down a bite of everything else on my plate before admitting to myself that I don’t want this gross food. I want roasted potatoes and vegetables with rosemary and thyme. I want cheese and a loaf of crusty bread. I want to be French forever! I stroll to the kitchen and dump my plate of junk in the trash.”

  Real foods have the best flavors. When you introduce them back into your life, you realize how wonderful they are and how insipid faux foods actually taste. And you don’t have to do anything incredible or heroic in the kitchen as a chef … just eat real food.

  Staples to Stock

  Nonrefrigerated Foods

  CANNED FISH

  Salmon

  Sardines

  Tuna

  GRAINS

  Couscous

  Granola

  Oats

  Pasta

  Rice

  VEGETABLES

  Beans (pinto, white, field peas, chickpeas, green beans)

  Onions (sweet and red)

  Potatoes (yams, new, and other varieties)

  Pumpkin

  Tomatoes

  OILS AND VINEGARS

  Extra-virgin olive oil

  100 percent vegetable oil

  Vinegar (white or red wine, balsamic)

  Walnut oil

  BAKING ITEMS

  Baking powder

  Cocoa powder

  Cornstarch

  Flour (all-purpose or whole wheat)

  Herbs/spices

  Sugars (white or brown)

  Pepper

  Salt

  Vanilla extract

  SNACKS

  Crackers and chips (nonhydrogenated)

  Dried fruit

  Hummus

  Marinated mushrooms

  Nuts (any variety)

  Olives

  Popcorn kernels

  Salsa

  CONDIMENTS

  Capers

  Mustard (spicy or yellow)

  Olive paste

  Pickles

  Real mayonnaise

  Soy sauce

  Sun-dried tomato spread

  Tabasco sauce

  Refrigerated Foods

  DAIRY

  Butter

  Cheese

  Eggs

  Milk

  Yogurt

  DRINKS

  Coffee

  Beer

  Juice (100 percent fruit)

  Milk

  Tea

  Water

  Wine

  VEGETABLES

  No restrictions here

  FRUITS

  No restrictions here, either

  MEATS

  Beef (rarely)

  Chicken

  Deli items (ham, turkey, pepperoni, and so on)

  Fish

  Pork

  Shopping for Real Foods

  Years of dieting have conditioned us to hop between food groups, as weight-loss fads have come and gone. After all, how many of you filled your shopping cart with rice cakes and margarine when the low-fat dogma was the end-all answer? How many of you tossed out every potato and banana in your house to purchase bacon, eggs, and cheese when low-carb dieting was the rage? First you were coached to be afraid of fats, then carbs, then bad fats, then bad carbs, and so on. Take them all back!

  When you live the French lifestyle you will change your food choices without having to analyze another set of macromolecules. Now when you go to the grocery store, you’ll be shopping for food, not molecules. That way (thank heavens), you don’t have to mentally deconstruct the biochemistry of your food in the aisles! This lifestyle change releases you from any need for carb, calorie, or fat counters, and replaces them all with nothing more than high-quality foods. This is so refreshingly easy.

  Formerly Forbidden Foods, Welcome Back!

  If you have been chasing fad diets, you’ve had to wave a tearful good-bye to some wonderful foods. Now you can bring them back.

  Low-fat people: cheese, butter, ice cream, chocolate, salmon, cream, all nuts

  Low-carb people: rice, bread, potatoes, normal sugar, all fruits, all vegetables, wine, beer

  So it’s time now to return to the sane middle ground and eat real foods again. You can do this, but there are several pitfalls you have to negotiate as you weave your way through the aisles.

  First, don’t give in to embarrassment, like when your kids writhe about on the floor over your momentary hesitation to buy the chocolate-frosted-sugar-bomb cereals. Don’t cure their epilepsy de sugar bomb by dropping the dyed corn syrup balls disguised as cereal in the cart. Just keep moving. They’ll get over it.

  And you’ve heard this before, but it’s important—don’t shop hungry because that makes everything look good. I once went camping for five days when I was younger, tromping around with forty pounds on my back. At the end of the day we’d whip out our boxes of dried “starch and spice packet” grossness and boil it in siphoned stream water. It tasted five-star fabulous, and I couldn’t get enough. Later, when my body wasn’t drunk from fatigue and famine, I tried this particular product again and it was road-kill horrid—the texture, the flavor, all of it. I couldn’t believe I had ever been in a situation where I liked it—much less loved it.

  So schedule your shopping right after a meal and, if you are taking your kids along, don’t even go near the cereal aisle.

  Another big help on this excursion: Bring a list. I know, I know, that sounds simple, right? But if you’ve ever gone to the store without one, you know that you forget the items you were supposed to come home with and buy all kinds of stuff you don’t really need. Also, when you make out your list, you can do it with an eye toward the next few meals. Buy only what you need for those immediate dishes: garlic, onion, mushrooms, fish, and so on. And be sure to check our recipes in the back for your dinner tonight, and the ingredients you’ll need for them.

  Step by Step Shopping from A to Z

  Standard grocery stores have the same basic layout. The fresh foods are arranged around the periphery
of the store, the freezer aisles are somewhere in the middle, and the impulse candy is stacked up in the checkout line (the nutritional equivalent of the quality reading material it shares space with). Unfortunately, each section of the store has its own shopping challenges for the person who wants to eat real food. You’ll need to understand the trade-offs you face, the products that are good for you, and the food products you should avoid altogether.

  Carry this guide with you to the store to help with your food choices in every single aisle. After a couple of trips, you’ll have it down pat.

  A. Fresh Fruits and Vegetables

  Virtually every grocery store presents you with the look and feel of good food and good health as you enter it. Banks of open-market style fruit and vegetable bins border your weave through this section. How can you go wrong with fruits and veggies? Well, there are some considerations.

  First of all, unless the sign says LOCALLY GROWN, chances are that the fruit was picked green, shipped in from somewhere far away like Latin America, and gassed with ethylene. Ethylene is produced by the combustion of kerosene, and also by ripening fruit itself. They gas the fruit right before it’s released into the “fresh from the tree” bins in a process called de-greening.

  Everyone asks if they have to buy organically grown fruits and veggies. Organic means that it has been grown without the pesticides that can transfer chemicals into the skin of the fruit or vegetable (that is, you can’t just wash it off). A 2003 study from Seattle, Washington, compared how much pesticide contamination was absorbed into the bodies of preschool children who had eaten conventionally grown produce versus those who had eaten organic produce. The study found that the “total [organophosphorus pesticide breakdown of products] was approximately six times higher for children with conventional diets than for children with organic diets.”

  It’s crazy that regular vegetables grown in the normal way are now considered “organic,” which can mean special, fringe, and more expensive. But pesticide-sprayed apples show up in the bins as simply “apples.” The same thing is true of genetically modified produce like corn and tomatoes. And yet, the produce that was grown from the earth without altered fish genes injected into them are sequestered in the organic section.

  As reported by the FDA in the November/December issue of FDA Consumer Magazine, “The Grocery Manufacturers of America estimates that between 70 and 75 percent of all processed foods … may contain ingredients from genetically engineered plants.” Are you shocked by those numbers? If so, that’s because the food industry deliberately keeps that fact off food labels, because you wouldn’t buy the product if they told you it was genetically modified. So it’s hidden, and much money has been spent making sure it stays hidden. Given that, what do we do?

  Remember that your health is not black or white—either or—but more like a continuous sliding scale. For example, let’s say you grow all your own fruits and veggies, you have your own chickens in the yard, and your cattle out on the back forty are grass fed and slaughtered in the nicest possible way. All that would place you very high up on the health scale. If you washed down your chocolate-frosted cereal with soda for three meals every day, served with a side of fast food, you would be on the very low side of the scale.

  Pick the best place on the scale you can, for your tastes and budget. If you’re not ready to buy all organic produce and free-range meats, at least get the regular fruits and veggies and move yourself up on the health scale. If you can get organic or locally grown produce, do it. It’s much better for you and you won’t have to worry about just how much of the “pesticide breakdown products” are being absorbed by you or your children. But at the very least, don’t buy faux foods. Find the place as high up on the scale as you personally can go. For example, in the case of fruit:

  BEST: Organic fruit, locally grown.

  ACCEPTABLE: Conventionally grown or genetically modified.

  FAUX: Fruit-flavored products.

  HOW OFTEN TO BUY: Purchase seasonal produce each time.

  B. Prepared Foods

  Typically, beside the deli and produce are the prepared foods. Many grocers now produce them: chicken cordon bleu, stuffed salmon, rotisserie chicken, sushi, and all kinds of healthy side dishes. They’re wonderful if you’re in a hurry. Just take them home, toss them into the oven, and, voilà, you’re in business. The sides are good as well and, although it depends on the store, you can generally assume that the cole slaw is made with normal cabbage and mayonnaise, the hummus is real, and the macaroni salad is made from normal pasta. A store’s products are more reliable because they don’t need to use the food industry’s chemicals. Their products don’t have to withstand weeks of manufacture, packaging, and transportation only to last another two full weeks on the shelf.

  This makes their prepared foods a perfect quick pickup for an easy dinner when your pantry’s stock is low or you’re out of time.

  The only real drawback to these prepared foods concerns the meats used. It’s impossible to know whether the salmon is farm raised, the tuna is mercury free, or the chicken is free range.

  BEST: Veggie sides like hummus, cole slaw, and macaroni salad.

  ACCEPTABLE: Main dishes such as sushi, prepared salmon, tuna, and chicken salads.

  FAUX: Nothing here.

  HOW OFTEN TO BUY: Whenever you are pressed for time and need something healthy, right away.

  C. Deli

  Deli meats are perfect for lunch sandwiches. In fact, most of the products you’ll find in the deli case are just fine, but should be limited in quantity, from most frequently used to least frequently used in this order: turkey and chicken, ham, bologna, pepperoni, roast beef.

  Again, real food is never the enemy, overconsumption of the food is what makes it bad. So the question is, for deli meats, where is the line? If you made ten trips to the deli, you might choose turkey or chicken five times, ham twice, and bologna, pepperoni, and roast beef once each.

  The concern here is not the food itself, but the preservatives in it. However, many brands now produce nitrate-free varieties of their turkey, ham, and roast beef. Ask at the counter for them. If you shop at one of the grocery stores that feature natural and organic foods, such as Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and Trader Joe’s, you’ll have a better chance of finding them.

  When choosing deli cheeses for your sandwich, avoid the items most likely to be hydrogenated—such as yellow and orange American singles. You can count on most Italian cheeses, including provolone and mozzarella. If in doubt, ask the person behind the counter to check the ingredients for you. Swiss is a variety that can go either way, so be sure to ask the attendant.

  BEST: Any of the meats or cheeses, as long as they are nitrate-free and not made from hydrogenated oils.

  ACCEPTABLE: Conventional deli meats, as long as you limit your consumption to once per week or less.

  FAUX: Cheeses with hydrogenated oils.

  HOW OFTEN TO BUY: Preservative-free deli meats and fresh cheeses are terrific staples to have on hand for emergency lunches, but the nitrate-laden varieties should be limited to once per week, and the hydrogenated cheeses should never be substituted for the real thing.

  D. Specialty Cheeses

  What tradition could be more French than ending a meal with a fabulous cheese? But when you’re shopping at a conventional store, many people have complained that they can’t get anything better than the shrink-wrapped “mozzarella” sticks, “Parmesan” dust in a can, and “cheese food.” But there’s been something of a cheese awakening of late, and entirely new flavors are becoming more widely available in supermarkets across the country, from Brie and Camembert to goat cheeses, fetas, and even raw-milk varieties.

  In fact, even some standard grocery stores now have so many choices that it seems overwhelming when you survey the mini-stadium of cheeses they line up for you. But have patience (this is the good part). Try new ones—or ask the attendant behind the counter to sneak you a little nibble so you can compare. Remember to buy smaller a
mounts than you think you need.

  A little is wonderful. To keep from becoming unhealthy for you, simply don’t eat a ton of it at once.

  BEST: Almost all specialty cheeses are fine. But raw-milk cheeses will provide natural bacteria that are good for your digestive system.

  ACCEPTABLE: The most mass-produced varieties will be more likely to use trace levels of artificial ingredients in their products. These are okay, but not as good as the cheeses made on smaller farms with all natural ingredients.

  FAUX: None here. The fake cheeses are not sold in the specialty cheese area, they’re over in the dairy section.