Now I understand why my mother will never go over her two-chapatti limit and, therefore, always find room for a little bit of the gulab jamun without it showing on her.

Alka Bhardwaj Ahuja devours a new, slim diet tome and learns the secret of looking like the quintessential svelte French woman

Here’s a question for you, dear readers: it’s close to midnight and we are almost through 2005 – do you know where your diet plan is? Or even, to go back one step, what your diet plan is? I have to confess that I don’t. I thought I knew exactly where I was going at the beginning of the year. Just like the rest of my resolutions-obsessed sisters-in-soul, I faced January 1st, 2005 with my shoulders thrown back, tummy tucked tightly in and a long list of dos and don’ts. Lots of fruits and veggies, eight glasses of water a day, cutting down on carbs while casually referring to the glycemic index for my favourite foods, periodic Ayurvedic cleansing weekends and, of course, plenty of exercise.

Seemed simple enough and things went fairly smoothly for several months, though I did have a few bad moments even early on, especially a recurrent orgasmic dream involving baguettes and a pineapple upside-down cake that had me trying to chew through my bolster!

Life might have continued in that fashion had my devotion to diet books not stepped in and thrown my resigned acceptance into a state of complete confusion. Browsing through the new releases at my local bookstore, I found one that was all the rage among the with-it moms at my daughter’s school: French Women Don’t Get Fat, a fairly slim (as diet tomes go) book that promised to teach me ‘the secret of eating for pleasure’. I put aside all my pressing commitments – lunch bunch at the kindergarten, a jewellery exhibition at a friend’s, even my afternoon nap – to devour the book in a day-and-a-half, only to come away with a mild case of l’indigestion and a much stronger one of déjà vu.

For the uninformed, what French Women...says is that bread (oui, oui, le white bread in the form of les croissants and les baguettes) is not the diet demon it’s being made out to be. Not, of course, the spongy white slices that come pre-packaged with super-long shelf lives, pas du tout, but the artisan loaves that are lovingly turned out by boutique bakers.

The trick to eating and looking like a French woman, says author Mireille Guiliano, lies in
portion control. Don’t ‘supersize’, warns Guiliano who’s apparently been there and done just that, talking to a mainly American audience that has single-handedly supported the diet book publishing industry.

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