The French Don't Diet Plan

by Dr. William Clower

  Be sure to take note of your hunger level as you approach the end of your meal. This is the first step to becoming a “conscious eater” and paying attention to the sensations of satisfaction you get from eating. When you take just a minute to check in with your body as you go, you’ll be far less likely to overdo it and far more likely to stop when you’re satisfied to prevent overconsumption.

  Finally, keep a notebook and write these observations down. They’ll significantly change over time, and you’ll be surprised at yourself even after the first few days have passed.

  Coast into Feeling Satisfied

  Timing, as they say, is everything. As you practice eating at a gracious pace, you’ll realize just how much your satisfaction is delayed. So pause toward the end of a meal, and briefly to listen to your body. As you sit at the table and enjoy your friends, family, book, or music, you’ll notice that you’re not satisfied yet. Or that you’re barely satisfied and really feel like you could eat another helping or so. But wait.

  Be patient for just two to three more minutes and you’ll feel those sensations coming on. You’ll have added absolutely nothing more to your belly, but in only a minute or two you’ll find that you’re absolutely full.

  Once you know this can happen to your body, it’s the most amazing thing. You realize that you’ve actually had enough, but you just can’t feel it yet. It’s easy to see how this awareness of your own mind-body connection solves overconsumption for you, as you learn how to put on the brakes before overdoing it.

  The solution is so easy and pleasant. Just relax at the table through your meal. Coast for a while after you’re done and enjoy the people around you. This is the portion of the French meal where lingering conversation becomes an art. Even at the neurological hospital where I had lunch every day, the doctors and nurses with their busy schedules took their time at meals. I never saw anyone gulping down their last two bites of lemon tart or standing up to shove back their last bite of brie before their mad dash back to work!

  The French, of course, don’t adopt these slimming eating habits to control their weight. They practice them naturally because they love their food. But now you have to apply the French approach in your hectic life, in your own culture. Below are some of the pressures that may cause you to eat too fast, miss the flavor of your meals, and escalate your body’s call for more and more food at the same time. Try the solutions that follow and you can make them work for you right away.

  Situations That Make Us Eat Too Fast

  Problem: Being in a hurry or distracted.

  Solution: Stop before you start.

  Focus on Your Food

  The eating rate was significantly slower among obese subjects when they ate blindfolded” (Barkeling, 2003).

  This interesting study makes the point that, without the distraction of vision, subjects paid more attention to the smell, taste, and texture of the food, ate slower, and ate less of it. So attend to what you’re eating and you’ll slow your eating pace. Slowing down decreases consumption for you automatically.

  A friend of mine runs one of the best Mediterranean markets in Pittsburgh. He came to me and groused that he had weight to lose. He eats the food he sells, so I know it’s not only good, it’s fabulous! I asked him how long it took him to eat his lunch, and he croaked “two minutes.”

  Ah. There you go. So I talked to him about sitting down and pacing his lunch, and how that one very simple eating habit—eating too quickly—was the source of his problems. I saw him six weeks later and he’d lost fifteen pounds.

  Remember Physics 101? Objects in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force. In this case, if you’re living life at one hundred miles per hour, you’re going to eat at that speed, too, overconsume, feel stuffed, and slide down the slippery weight-gain slope before you ever realize what happened. So insert a break to slow you down before you project that frenzy onto your lunch or dinner.

  Say a prayer or meditate. When I was growing up in Alabama, it was a given that everybody prayed before a meal. Now that I’m out on the open globe, I see people doing the same basic thing by giving a quick nod of thanks to the universe or just relaxing for a minute before beginning dinner. The French generally don’t pray, but they do pause before starting their meals. This practice gives them time to mentally unwind and relax a bit first.

  However you choose to plug it into your personal cosmology, the result is the same. Just listen to this research result from Dr. Barkeling: “A higher initial eating rate reflecting eating drive was associated with signs of stress overload…. The stress overload may prompt eating, and affective responsiveness may be linked to appetite through a higher sensitivity to food stimuli, thus increasing eating drive. An accelerating rate of consumption during the meal was associated with intense emotionality and oral dependency.”

  Here’s the science-to-English translation: Relax in some way before you start eating or you’ll eat too fast. Eat too fast and you’ll eat too much. Eat too much and you’ll lose control of your weight and health.

  Take a few deep breaths (see Step 9 for more on these minimeditations). If you find yourself hurried into a meal, the best you can do for yourself is to close your eyes, take a few lingering breaths from your belly, and then start. This calms you down so you don’t apply the pace of your rapid-fire life to your meal.

  Remember, everything has its own inertia, or momentum, including you. That’s why rule number one to make the French approach work in your life is to give yourself the freedom to take your time with your meal. Then you can enjoy it without overeating.

  Problem: Passive overconsumption.

  Solution: Focus on your food.

  If you’re distracted by something (eating in the car, watching TV, walking back to your job), you’re likely to overeat. It’s that simple. Dr. Jennifer Utter and colleagues, reporting in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, are among the groups of scientists showing that “television/video use among boys and girls [is] associated with more unhealthful dietary behaviors (e.g., increased consumption of soft drinks, fried foods, and snacks).”

  The science is very clear about this phenomenon. Writes Brigitte Boon in a 2002 study, “As predicted, … restrained eaters ate the same amount as unrestrained eaters when not distracted, but considerably more when distracted. There was also an unexpected main effect, which indicated that [all] eaters ate more if distracted than if not distracted.”

  The science-to-English translation? Pay attention to what you’re eating. You’ll taste more if it and eat less of it.

  Research aside, just think about this intuitively for a minute. If you don’t even notice what you’re putting in your mouth because you’re dodging traffic or focused on something far more pressing (like Seinfeld reruns), you’ll just keep putting hand to mouth.

  The French solution to this problem is so easy to apply. First, here are the don’ts: Don’t eat in the car if you can help it. Don’t eat while watching TV if you can help it. Never eat on your feet. The French don’t even have drink holders in their cars! They could not imagine eating while walking back to the office, as if the meal were no more important than blowing your nose or running an errand.

  Now the dos: Do return to the family table (see Step 8). Do eat with people you enjoy being around and make time to include them. Do set the table. Do practice sensual eating and focus on how good your food tastes instead of some other activity. And finally, do set aside your eating time and make it a priority in your day.

  Problem: Keeping your food in your hand.

  Tonight, when you eat, try this experiment. As you’re chewing a bite, look at your hand. Is there a forkful of food in it? Are you waiting for the very second when you can slip more food in your mouth? Realize that the only, only reason to still have food on your fork or in your hand is to get more in your mouth. This seemingly benign but insidious habit can be one of the most difficult ones to break, but it must be broken because it absolutely makes you eat too much
too fast.

  Solution 1: Establish a healthy rhythm of eating.

  If there’s food in your mouth, there should be nothing poised on your fork, waiting like a plane on the runway. Here’s the rule: If food’s in your mouth, nothing’s in your hand.

  As you spend your leisurely twenty minutes at a meal, practice this healthy eating routine:

  Take a bite-size piece.

  Put your food or fork down.

  Completely finish what you have in your mouth.

  Only then pick up your food or fork.

  Have another bite-size piece.

  This habit won’t serve you well until it gets worn into a comfortable groove by repetition. So, to make this rhythm a natural part of your relationship with food, begin by mentally reminding yourself of this new pacing routine until it becomes second nature. If you find that you have to think about it to make it happen, don’t worry. Soon you’ll look down and see that you’ve set your fork down subconsciously. That’s the goal!

  Solution 2: Engage in conversation.

  If, as they say, hunger is the best sauce, then conversation comes in a close second. It’s the most pleasant part of the meal and a normal part of the French table. Remember conversation? That’s what we used to do before eating became a point between errands. And it needs to be revived because talking at the table with your friends is actually a wonderful weight loss strategy.

  If you’re enjoying a conversation with friends or family, you’re not eating nonstop. This alone can slow you down enough to let the satiety signal drift up to your brain, so you can feel when you’ve had enough. And when you’re in animated conversation, you tend to talk with your hands—so they’re not picking up food!

  So first be sure to take small bites and pause long enough between them to be able to say something without your food spilling out. When you think about the course of your meal, aim to have as much time with your mouth empty as full. And the perfect way to do this is to introduce conversation into the mix.

  If you’re dining alone, read something you enjoy during dinner or listen to music. This also slows you down so you can enjoy your food more, and eat less in the process. The key for you will be setting the fork or food down between bites. Since you don’t have a companion to bounce thoughts off, you’ll lean more heavily on the healthy rhythm of eating above.

  Problem: Taking bites that are way too big.

  If you tend to fill your fork and mouth to capacity and gulp down your meal, you’ll be done in no time. Are you getting a visual? If this is you, chances are your sense of bite-size is way off and needs to be retrained, or you’ll keep overeating at this most basic level. Bite size, like the size of our plates and servings and drinks, has blown through the roof in the last few years. The volume knob has been cranked up on everything we eat, including our sense of what a bite actually is.

  If you want your changes in eating behavior to last, start with a strong foundation. And the very first change is with your bite, with a rule of thumb you can follow every day. Something simple and intuitive with a size measure you can carry with you all the time.

  Solution 1: Use the “rule of thumb,” a bite-size exercise.

  Hold up your hand in front of you, palm facing toward you. Give yourself the thumbs-up sign with that hand. Now bend your thumb’s top joint down.

  Next, I want you to lightly touch your teeth to the top and bottom of your bent thumb (lengthwise, from knuckle to tip). Then, without changing the size of your open mouth, take your thumb out and notice how wide your mouth is.

  It’s huge! You should never take a bite larger than this. Try the same exercise by turning your thumb sideways. Even at this, your mouth is plenty big.

  Now take a look at the top segment of your thumb. Admit it. It looks like a nano-nibble at best, and there’s no way it could possibly be enough for a bite. But when you do this objective test, and think about how big you’d have to stretch your mouth open to get anything larger in there, you realize that it’s about right.

  VITAL STATS ON A THUMB JOINT 1 ¼ inches long, ¾ inch wide.

  This is part of the problem, isn’t it? Our perception of food quantity has become enlarged, like seeing it through a warped circus mirror. We’ve got to flatten that mirror and finally return ourselves to a realistic judgment.

  So use the rule of thumb as the maximum bite size for the food you put in your mouth. If it seems like cruel and unusual punishment to eat that small, it’s only because you’ve become accustomed to normally huge bites. But it actually doesn’t take more than a couple of weeks until your thumb-size bites seem perfectly normal. Moreover, this very easy and intuitive rule can be used when eating with silverware or with your fingers.

  Solution 2: Use the right tool for the right job.

  The rule of thumb is helpful but, much of the time, your bite size is determined by the dimensions of your fork or spoon. The larger the spade, the more fill you’ll put on it. If you run into this problem, there’s a simple solution. Eat with a dessert fork or small spoon.

  VITAL STATS ON A DESSERT FORK: 1 ½ inches long, 1 inch wide.

  Keep in mind that you’re likely to experience the same initial psychological response, and think that this baby fork is ridiculously tiny! But “large” and “small” are only meaningful in relation to other things. If it seems little to you, then you know you’ve been eating too large all this time. But you can change your own sense of large and small by making these simple changes.

  And that’s the best part. You get to decide. You’re in control.

  I don’t think anybody wants to overconsume—it just happens unconsciously when your habits cause you to eat so large. That becomes your norm. But you really can be a small eater! Just use the rule of thumb with every bite until it becomes natural.

  Solution 3: Become a people watcher.

  When you go to a restaurant, observe how thin people eat. Just take note. Then watch how overweight people eat. Again, compare those habits to your own. Even after you’ve already ordered your food, you’ll notice people who enter the restaurant, wolf down their meals, and then leave before you do. You’ll notice people who stuff their mouths and themselves. You’ll see people gobbling through their meals and never speaking to one another.

  They’re not tasting their food, they’re just inhaling it. When you see that and realize how bad it is, you begin to identify the destructive eating habits as those you don’t want to have for yourself—and the healthy eating habits as those you do want. That identification is a wonderful training tool. Do this every time you eat and you’ll be less likely to replay their mistakes—and more likely to adopt the others’ healthy habits.

  Solution 4: Guesstimate when you eat with your hands.

  Managing your bite size with your fork is easy. Just cut the food into realistic little pieces. Then you actually see the size and can make sure you’re following the rule of thumb. But what do you do when you have a slice of pizza or your morning pain au chocolat? You could cut them, but it’s more likely that you’ll just eat them by hand.

  This is why finger foods and convenience foods can quickly sabotage your weight loss efforts. It’s so easy to pick up five fries at a time, fill up your cheek pouch, and drive on. It’s much more difficult to estimate a normal bite size with a pizza slice. So you have to judge the rule of thumb on the fly, and take no more than an inch of that pizza or hamburger or fry at a time. Most of us have trouble with this estimation so, at first anyway, try slicing your food into the appropriate size.

  This is where bite size is really going to hit you. The first time you cut off one inch of that wedge, you’ll think, “Wow, that’s tiny!” But this reaction simply means that you’re relearning the bite size that will help take your weight off, not put it on.

  The second rule for handheld food is the same as the rule for eating with a fork—but it’s even more important for handheld foods. If you have food in your mouth, get the food out of your hands. Set the pizza, croissant, or sandw
ich down. Don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere. No one’s going to rush in and snatch it away from you.

  It matters even more to set handheld foods down because of the neurological connection between your mouth and your hands. Have you ever watched people perform something difficult or complex with their fingers? Contortions seize their mouths, as their lips curl and their tongues snake around their teeth. It’s funny to watch, and reflects the strong neural link we all have between the hands and mouth.

  Thus, as long as you’re holding something tasty, your natural oral fixation lures it right into your mouth. And that gravitation is even greater when you’re distracted by TV, driving, or when you’re eating on your feet. Whenever your mind is on something else, automatic reflexes kick in to put food to mouth. Short-circuit them by simply setting your food down.

  Don’t Forget, Don’t Diet

  Why doesn’t a five-minute Slim-Fast shake, or a two-minute low-carb breakfast bar work in the long run as a weight loss tool? As we see with the French approach, it’s because basic habits of healthy weight loss work from the bottom up. Controlling your pace is a far more effective tool to control your portions (as we’ll see in the next step), which permanently controls your weight. Small changes cascade into long-lasting results.