The French Don't Diet Plan
Page 14
But what if you’re ordering out? Let’s take pizza as the perfect example. If you order a pizza and set the box on your lap in front of the TV, the box becomes your plate, and your body will think of the entire pizza as a portion. The solution is that, when it arrives, serve a slice on a plate and set the box in the oven on a low temperature to keep it warm. Only serve yourself one piece at a time. You can always go back if you want more, but this way you prevent the mindless gobbling that a lapful of pizza can produce.
Your Guide to Proper Portions
Remember that these portions are approximate and your own amounts will change over time. But, as suggestions, they provide a good reference point.
Drinks don’t count as a portion, as long as they’re in the small category (six ounces or so). If your drink is larger than that, it counts as one portion. All drinks must be “real”—water, tea, coffee, wine, juice, and not diet or regular sodas (see Step 3 for information on their effects on you).
BREADS
1 slice whole-wheat, rye, white, or pumpernickel bread
½ English muffin
½ bagel
1 dinner roll
One 6-inch-diameter pita bread
One 6-inch-diameter corn or flour tortilla
CEREALS AND GRAINS
1 cup cold cereal
1 ½ cups puffed cereal (for example, puffed rice)
½ cup cooked cereal (for example, oatmeal, oat bran, cream of wheat)
½ cup cooked brown or white rice
½ cup cooked pasta or soba noodles
SNACK FOODS
1 ounce cheese (think of four dice)
1 ½ cups popped natural popcorn
2 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter or hummus
4 to 6 whole-wheat crackers
Two 4-inch-diameter rice or corn cakes
6 unsalted nuts (such as Brazil nuts)
6 large black or green olives
4 slices Melba toast
VEGETABLES (THINK OF A RACQUET BALL)
½ cup cooked or canned beans, lentils, or peas (lima, kidney,
black, and so on)
½ avocado
1 cup raw leafy vegetables (for example, kale, spinach, romaine, arugula, bibb lettuce, iceberg lettuce, and watercress)
1 cup raw vegetables (for example, carrots, broccoli, asparagus, and onions)
½ cup cooked vegetables (most kinds)
1 small, 3-ounce baked potato
½ cup cooked mashed potatoes
FRUITS (THINK OF A TENNIS BALL)
1 small, 4-ounce apple
½ cup applesauce, unsweetened
1 medium banana
¾ cup berries or melon
1 medium peach, nectarine, kiwi, or plum
½ medium grapefruit
½ cup fruit cocktail, in its own juice, without syrup
4 prunes (also called “dried plums”)
2 tablespoons raisins or other dried fruit
MEATS (THINK OF A PACK OF PLAYING CARDS)
1/3 pound chicken, turkey, fish, beef, or pork
2 slices bacon
1 can fish such as herring or sardines
1 small can tuna in water
DAIRY (THINK OF FOUR DICE)
1 ounce most cheeses (Parmesan, mozzarella, ricotta, and so on)
2 eggs
8 ounces (1 cup) milk or variants
4 ounces (½ cup) plain or fruit yogurt
1 to 2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons cream, half-and-half, or sour cream
Plan on Seconds
I know you can’t always eat in courses (realistically, we don’t all have time to make appetizers, soup, and salad to go with the main dish), but you can still make this principle work for your weight and health.
So, dinner’s ready, you’ve got a spoon in the peas, and everyone in your family has their smaller plates outstretched to be served. Now what? How do you control food volume? How much should you scoop out onto the plates? The answer is very simple: Plan on seconds.
I love this rule because, like the one that says we should love our food more, something about it sounds so wrong. People hear this and think I’m advising them to gobble even more, when in fact it results in just the opposite effect. Planning on seconds actually causes you to eat less.
It works like this: There’s no need to measure out food quantities on a scale. When you have food to dole out on your (medium-size) plate, serve yourself an amount small enough so that you’ll look at it and think, “That’s not quite enough for me. I’m going to have to go back for seconds.” That amount is your perfect portion.
By planning ahead of time to go back for seconds, you set yourself up for success, not failure. Now use the habits of healthy eating learned in the prior step, and take your time with that amount over twenty minutes. When you finish the food on the plate, you’ll find that most of the time you’re perfectly satisfied with your original portion. (Be prepared to “coast” into satisfied. See Step 4.)
If after twenty minutes you are not content, and you need a bit more, apply the same rule to plan on (in this case) thirds. Put an amount on your plate that you think isn’t quite enough, even if that’s just a bite or two. Then take your time with your seconds until you’re done. By this time, you should feel satisfied. If not, consider having dessert. Yes! You get to have dessert!
Do the very same thing when you eat in courses. Have them in small manageable increments, each of which is less than the total amount you’re hungry for. Consciously avoiding a single huge plate of food will train your body to not overeat. By the way, this is not about fooling yourself with a visual trick. It’s an intelligent way to take advantage of the way your body’s physiology of hunger operates.
Problem: “Clean Your Plate.”
The equation below is the scientific validation of something we all know as the clean-your-plate problem. Its basic math runs like this: There are starving children in third-world countries plus food stares up at you from your plate equals keep eating until it’s gone. We’ve already covered the basic solutions to this common parentally induced problem—start with a smaller plate and plan on seconds—but now we’re going to add homework for you to practice.
Solution 1: Leave food on your plate.
We shouldn’t eat just because food is within reach, we should eat because we’re hungry.
We don’t stop eating just because there’s no more food in sight, we stop when we’re full. But to know when to stop and start, to even be able to hear your body’s signals, you must be comfortable with having food left in front of you, and with not eating it when you’re not hungry. This is a skill that you must practice just as you would any other task.
Learn to be at peace with leaving food on your plate. The amount you leave doesn’t matter, as long as you keep at it. When you clean up, you have permission to toss those last four macaroni noodles or carrot pieces in the trash—or into a Tupperware container if you like. It’s a good exercise. And the more you do this the better you’ll become at it. The control and confidence you get from mastering this situation will apply across situations: the cookie jar, the holiday junk fest at the office, and between-meal munchies.
Solution 2: Plan on dessert.
When you live this lifestyle, you can have dessert after any meal—but only if you aren’t satisfied yet. If you’ve eaten enough at dinner and are nicely content, you might not have dessert. You’ve already given your body its fill, and dessert will just pile on more where it’s not needed or wanted.
Prepare for dessert by planning on it—and finishing dinner without being full already. Think about this as a wonderful preparation for what lies ahead. And whatever dessert you’re having will taste so much better if you’re not already full!
At home, we typically wait for ten to fifteen minutes before having dessert. We’ll sit for a while or pick up the plates and put away the food, and then put out the pie or serve the ice cream or whatever it is. When you do have dessert, treat it just like y
ou do your food. Take small bites, put your fork or spoon down between bites, and make it last long enough to really enjoy it.
Don’t Forget, Don’t Diet
Prescriptive diets will tell you, to the gram, how much you should portion out for yourself. You’re under the constant scrutiny of carb counters or fat counters or point counters. What’s the problem with this approach? Yes, it can work in the short term but tends to fail in the long term. But what else is wrong with it?
What if you’re an athlete? What if you’re typically a nibbler? What if you have a faster (or slower) than usual metabolism? There is no standard physiology, just like there’s no standard person, and so there should be no one-size-fits-all set of recommended portions.
If you’re overweight, your current portions (whatever they are) are greater than your body’s energy needs. What is the exact portion size your specific physiology needs for its optimal weight set point? There’s no way for you to know that yet. But what you can do is move your portions in the direction you need them to go. Remember, this is a dynamic process of eating well. You’ll become a healthy eater as you practice these lessons, and control your portions. It doesn’t matter how big they are right now. Not one bit. But it really does matter that you change them in the right direction day by day.
Hence planning on seconds is an important step. Yes, it gets you to dole out the right amount for your body onto the plate. But that “right” amount will be relative to you—with your personal starting spot for portions—not me, and my arbitrary rules obtained from some new dietary actuarial table.
This initial amount changes as your body adapts to your new behaviors. If you have weight to lose, the portions you put on your plate will drop over time. This is your goal. And it doesn’t matter if it takes two days, two weeks, or two months. Some people’s bodies will respond right away, and others will adapt over a longer time frame. Each person will proceed at a different rate, just like all of us have different optimal portion sizes.
Be consistent; wait for the change. When you see it, you will know you’re making a great stride toward healthy weight loss that will last as long as you need it to.
CHEAT SHEET: SOLVING PORTION DISTORTION
Remember how your mind and body treat hunger differently? Your body senses your need for food, and your mind drastically amplifies that amount. Your solution is to undershoot your apparent hunger.
Love your food again—remember what it means to love your food, really.
Eat small bites so you can taste it more.
Plan on seconds—put an amount on your plate that you know will be not quite enough, then take your time and enjoy that amount of food.
Plate size matters—put away large plates forever. Just do it. Eat on medium-size plates and you become a medium-size eater!
The Results You’re Looking For
IMMEDIATELY
You should never be stuffed again.
WITHIN DAYS
You’ll find that your new portions allow you to be satisfied without having to go back for seconds.
Your estimation of the amount of food your body needs will vary from meal to meal, so don’t worry if you don’t always get it right.
WITHIN A COUPLE OF WEEKS
Your mental expectations for the amount of food that seems right will drop as well.
OVER MONTHS
Your clean-your-plate problem will vanish and you’ll be comfortable with walking away from food on your plate.
You will increase your self-confidence and ability to control portion distortion across a broad spectrum of situations.
HOMEWORK: EATING THE MEAL
Get ready for dinner:
If you live with a family or a group, schedule dinner so you all can eat together. Make the time to take time with them.
If you live alone, treat yourself right. Create a clean, pleasant atmosphere, with candles or background music—whatever you love best.
Set the table: Use only medium-size plates.
Serve the food: Plan on seconds by underestimating your apparent hunger.
During the meal: Take at least twenty minutes to enjoy the meal.
After the meal: Relax at the table for about five minutes or more. Then, only if you are not yet full, have a wonderful dessert with your habits of healthy eating.
Step 6
Don’t Eat and Drink at the Same Time
Men who stuff themselves and grow tipsy know neither how to eat nor how to drink.
—JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN,
French culinary writer, 1826
Even though eating and drinking are both a part of the meal, you never hear much about the importance of liquids at the table when it comes to weight loss. But as I learned during my time in Lyon, the French have healthy drinking habits that decrease consumption and increase eating pleasure at the same time. These habits come down to some very basic differences between our beliefs about drinking. Let’s start with a day in the life of the drinking French.
At the Institute of Cognitive Sciences, we would walk over to eat lunch in the neurological hospital cafeteria. Of all my culture shock moments among the French, my first lunchtime on the job definitely earned a spot in the top ten. My colleagues, of course, thought their cafeteria food to be barely edible (just as we consider ours), but to my American palate, which had been dulled by greasy burgers and fries, the French version of “cafeteria food” easily approached sublime.
Filling the daily lunch tray normally began with a small baguette, followed by the entree and vegetables (Madeira chicken with lightly sautéed green beans with sliced almonds, for example), a small salad of greens or perhaps couscous with olives, a dessert of fruit or fruit tart, and cheese such as Camembert or Brie to round out the meal. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?
After paying and moving to the dining area, a selection of beverages was available ad libitum, including an entire cask of Côtes du Rhône! You could have as much as you wanted. How do I say this more clearly? Free refills of wine … in the hospital cafeteria … for doctors over lunch.
Now, I grew up in deepest Alabama, where the notion of wine on tap, for doctors, right in the middle of the workday, might tilt the Baptist brain right off the pier, to say the very least. But before we can understand how the French consume their liquids, we have to handle a preliminary issue. Why the shock at all? They’re not shocked. What was behind my own knee-jerk conclusion that unlimited access to free wine was an insane situation?
This reaction comes from how each of our cultures thinks about this drink. Naturally, the French consume all kinds of nonalcoholic beverages. But wine, of course, is a quintessential part of their dining culture. Parents often give their children a small amount of diluted wine with a meal when they reach a certain age (early teens), and this is seen as a first step into adulthood. It’s integral and, as such, is no big deal.
On the other hand, our culture tends to view wine and other alcoholic beverages as “intoxicants.” We don’t consider them in terms of foods or even drinks, but for their druglike properties. Seen in this way, the point of drinking is to achieve the effect of the drug, subtly (for relaxation, to unwind) or otherwise (to get drunk, blasted, plastered—the synonyms are unfortunately plentiful). We see alcohol, in any form, as a chemical that alters our faculties, and therefore encourages a social danger.
A perfect expression of our social malaise about alcohol is the medical community’s reluctance, until lately, to advise a glass of wine to protect the heart. Even before disco, French scientist Serge Renaud’s mid-1970s research informed us of wine’s heart-protective effects. However, the NIH later objected to his attempt to replicate his Canadian study here in America, citing concerns about “social repercussions.” Happy to prescribe an aspirin pill to thin the blood, many physicians remain hampered by an intrinsic fear of wine. This trepidation is quite valid, but only if we equate drinking alcohol with using a drug.
And for us, this conservative view makes sense given that our cul
ture equates bigger with better and volume with value. Because we regularly gulp down large quantities of liquids with our meals (more on this later in the step), most of us would agree that it’s probably a good thing we don’t see wine on tap at the local cafeteria! Thus, our social solution has been to consistently advocate abstinence, while the French rely on responsibility.
But having a glass of wine with a meal each day is an aspect of the French routine that many of us would do well to adopt (assuming we keep it in control). Wine has wonderful health benefits, at a dose of one to two glasses per day, including major reductions in heart disease risk and the recurrence of heart attacks. The massive Copenhagen City Heart Study showed the greatest decrease in mortality, from all causes, to be for wine drinkers versus nondrinkers.