|
|
French Women Don't Get Fat (Paperback)
by Mireille Guiliano
| Category:
Weight-control, Healthy eating, Body, Health |
| Market price: ¥ 148.00
MSL price:
¥ 128.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
|
|
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A common sense approach to weight loss that has stood the test of time, Mireille Guiliano shows you a great way to enjoy food and life and still lose weight. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Mireille Guiliano
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: December, 2007
ISBN: 0375710515
Pages: 304
Measurements: 7 x 4.8 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01051
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0375710513
Language: American English
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
Enjoying status of a mega bestseller, this is probably the most favored resource on weight loss. Now also available in a paperback edition. |
|
- MSL Picks -
This book is valuable, not because it has new concepts, but because of the way in which the concepts are presented. They are presented with a flair. The book is about the simple fun in eating, cooking, socializing, walking, breathing and living.
The suggestions in the book are all modest and moderate and fun to implement. The recipes in the book are easy-to-use, tasty and in keeping with eating in moderation. Part of the approach is an emphasis on having a positive attitude and a joy in living. Also, discussed is the concept of savoring the taste of food in the mouth, eating slowly and reducing intake. The author encourages the reader to prepare fresh food and learn about the qualities one needs to look for in fresh and healthy food items.
This book is not just about what foods to eat, but it is about lifestyle and philosopy of life, eating in moderation with plentiful physical activity and proper socializing with food.
(From quoting G. Reid, USA)
Target readers:
All the women who are interested in the French way of weight loss and staying in good shape.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
Light on Yoga: The Bible of Modern Yoga...
:
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
 |
The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss (Paperback)
by Authur Agastston, M.D.
One of the sanest and healthiest diets in the low-carb field, which many people find working. |
 |
The Creator's Manual for Your Body (Paperback)
by Jamie Fettig
Good for anyone who chooses to improve their lives. Read the book, put the ideas into practice and strive to take control of your health and well being. |
 |
The New Optimum Nutrition Bible (Paperback)
by Patrick Holford
A well-researched and informative reference on what you eat. |
 |
Light on Yoga: The Bible of Modern Yoga... (Paperback)
by B. K. S. Iyengar , Yehudi Menuhin (Foreword)
This amazing book is a wealth of information - the more you explore, experience and learn about yoga, the more this book has to offer. |
 |
The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain (Paperback)
by John E. Sarno
This is a great book for illuminating how our perception of stressful events - worrying, trauma, negativity, anger - manifests itself in chronic, acute pain in the body. |
 |
You: On A Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management (Hardcover)
by Michael F. Roizen, MD, Mehmet C. Oz, MD
From the bestseling authors of You: The Owner's Manual comes another hit. Well researched and written with the signature wit, humor and accessibility, this book will stay with you as a constant reference. |
 |
The Maker's Diet: The 40 Day Health Experience That Will Change Your Life Forever (Hardcover)
by Jordan S. Rubin, N.M.D., Ph.D.
A Biblically-based diet and health program, whose success depends more on discipline and faith, as the author has done. |
 |
YOU: The Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger (Hardcover)
by Michael F. Roizen, M.D., Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
Geared to everyday people, You is packed with up to date and time proven information on how to stay healthy. Recommended to own. |
|
|
Mireille Guiliano, born and brought up in France, is an internationally best-selling author and a long-time spokesperson for Champagne Veuve Clicquot. For more than twenty years she was President and CEO of Clicquot, Inc. (LVMH). She is married to an American and lives most of the year in New York and France (Paris and Provence). Her favorite pastimes are breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her books have appeared in 37 languages.
|
|
From Publisher
Stylish, convincing, wise, funny–and just in time: the ultimate non-diet book, which could radically change the way you think and live.
French women don’t get fat, but they do eat bread and pastry, drink wine, and regularly enjoy three-course meals. In her delightful tale, Mireille Guiliano unlocks the simple secrets of this “French paradox” - how to enjoy food and stay slim and healthy. Hers is a charming, sensible, and powerfully life-affirming view of health and eating for our times.
As a typically slender French girl, Mireille (Meer-ray) went to America as an exchange student and came back fat. That shock sent her into an adolescent tailspin, until her kindly family physician, “Dr. Miracle,” came to the rescue. Reintroducing her to classic principles of French gastronomy plus time-honored secrets of the local women, he helped her restore her shape and gave her a whole new understanding of food, drink, and life. The key? Not guilt or deprivation but learning to get the most from the things you most enjoy. Following her own version of this traditional wisdom, she has ever since relished a life of indulgence without bulge, satisfying yen without yo-yo on three meals a day.
Now in simple but potent strategies and dozens of recipes you’d swear were fattening, Mireille reveals the ingredients for a lifetime of weight control - from the emergency weekend remedy of Magical Leek Soup to everyday tricks like fooling yourself into contentment and painless new physical exertions to save you from the StairMaster. Emphasizing the virtues of freshness, variety, balance, and always pleasure, Mireille shows how virtually anyone can learn to eat, drink, and move like a French woman.
A natural raconteur, Mireille illustrates her philosophy through the experiences that have shaped her life - a six-year-old’s first taste of Champagne, treks in search of tiny blueberries (called myrtilles) in the woods near her grandmother’s house, a near-spiritual rendezvous with oysters at a seaside restaurant in Brittany, to name but a few. She also shows us other women discovering the wonders of “French in action,” drawing examples from dozens of friends and associates she has advised over the years to eat and drink smarter and more joyfully.
Here are a culture’s most cherished and time-honored secrets recast for the twenty-first century. For anyone who has slipped out of her zone, missed the flight to South Beach, or accidentally let a carb pass her lips, here is a buoyant, positive way to stay trim. A life of wine, bread - even chocolate - without girth or guilt? Pourquoi pas?
|
Chapter 1
VIVE L’AMÉRIQUE:
THE BEGINNING... I AM OVERWEIGHT
I love my adopted homeland. But first, as an exchange student in Massachusetts, I learned to love chocolate-chip cookies and brownies. And I gained twenty pounds.
My love affair with America had begun with my love of the English language; we met at the lycée (junior high and high school) when I turned eleven. English was my favorite class after French literature, and I simply adored my English teacher. He had never been abroad but spoke English without a French accent or even a British one. He had learned it during World War II, when he found himself in a POW camp with a high school teacher from Weston, Massachusetts (I suspect they had long hours to practice). Without knowing whether they’d make it out alive, they decided that if they did, they would start an exchange program for high school seniors. Each year, one student from the United States would come to our town and one of us would go to Weston. The exchange continues to this day, and the competition is keen.
During my last year at the lycée, I had good enough grades to apply, but I wasn’t interested. With dreams of becoming an English teacher or professor, I was eager to start undergraduate studies at the local university. And at eighteen, naturally I had also convinced myself I was madly in love with a boy in my town. He was the handsomest though admittedly not the brightest boy around, the coqueluche (the darling) of all the girls. I couldn’t dream of parting from him, so I didn’t even think of applying for Weston. But in the schoolyard, between classes, there was hardly another topic of conversation. Among my friends, the odds-on favorite to go was Monique; she wanted it so badly, and besides, she was the best in our class, a fact not lost on the selection committee, which was chaired by my English teacher and included among its distinguished ranks PTA members, other teachers, the mayor, and the local Catholic priest, balanced by the Protestant minister. But on the Monday morning when the announcement was expected, the only thing announced was that no decision had been made.
At home that Thursday morning (those days, there was no school on Thursdays but half days on Saturday), my English teacher appeared at the door. He had come to see my mother, which seemed rather strange, considering my good grades. As soon as he left, with a big, satisfied smile but not a word to me except hello, my mother called me. Something was très important.
The selection committee had not found a suitable candidate. When I asked about Monique, my mother tried to explain something not easily fathomed at my age: My friend had everything going for her, but her parents were Communists, and that would not fly in America. The committee had debated at great length (it was a small town, where everybody was fully informed about everybody else), but they could not escape concluding that a daughter of Communists could never represent France!
My teacher had proposed me as an alternative, and the other members had agreed. But since I had not even applied, he had to come and persuade my parents to let me go. My overadoring father, who would never have condoned my running away for a year, was not home. Perhaps my teacher was counting on this fact; but in any event, he managed to sell the idea to my mother. The real work then fell to her, because she had to persuade not only my father, but me as well. Not that she was without her own misgivings about seeing me go, but Mamie was always wise and farsighted; and she usually got her way. I was terribly anxious about what Monique would say, but once word got out, she was first to declare what a fine ambassador I would make. Apparently, Communist families were quite open and practical about such matters, and she had already been given to understand that family ideology had made her a dark horse from the start.
And so I went. It was a wonderful year - one of the best of my adolescence - and it certainly changed the course of my entire life. To a young French girl, Weston, a wealthy Boston suburb, seemed an American dream - green, manicured, spread out, with huge gorgeous homes and well-to-do, well-schooled families. There was tennis, horseback riding, swimming pools, golf, and two or three cars per family - a far, far cry from any town in eastern France, then or now. The time was so full of new, unimagined things, but finally too rich, and I don’t mean demographically. For all the priceless new friends and experiences I was embracing, something else altogether, something sinister, was slowly taking shape. Almost before I could notice, it had turned into fifteen pounds, more or less... and quite probably more. It was August, my last month before the return voyage to France. I was in Nantucket 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.
In my final American weeks, I had become very sad at the thought of leaving all my new pals and relations, but I was also quite apprehensive of what my French friends and family would say at the sight of the new me. I had never mentioned the weight gain in letters and somehow managed to send photos showing me only from the waist up.
The moment of truth was approaching.
2
LA FILLE PRODIGUE:
RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
My father brought my brother with him to Le Havre to collect me. I was traveling on the SS Rotterdam. The ocean liner was still the transatlantic standard preferred by many French people in the late 1960s. With me was the new American exchange student from Weston, who would be spending the year in our town.
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 French man in his familiar beret - yes, a 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, “Tu ressembles à un sac de patates” (“You look like a sack of potatoes”). Some things don’t sound any prettier in French. I knew what he had in mind: not a market-size sack, but one of the big, 150-pound burlap affairs that are delivered to grocery stores and restaurants! Fortunately the girl from Weston spoke little French, else she would have had a troubling first impression of French family life.
At age nineteen, I could not have imagined anything more hurtful, and to this day the sting has not been topped. But my father was not being mean. True, tact was never his strength; and the teenage girl’s hypersensitivity about weight and looks wasn’t yet the proverbial pothole every parent today knows to steer around. The devastating welcome sprang more than anything from his having been caught off guard. Still, it was more than I could take. I was at once sad, furious, vexed, and helpless. At the time, I could not even measure the impact.
On our way home to eastern France, we stopped in Paris for a few days, just to show my friend from Weston the City of Light, but my inexorable grumpiness made everyone eager to hit the road again. I ruined Paris for all of us. I was a mess.
The coming months were bitter and awkward. I didn’t want anyone to see me, but everyone wanted to greet l’Américaine. My mother understood right away not only how and why I had gained the weight, but also how I felt. She treaded lightly, avoiding the unavoidable topic, perhaps particularly because I had soon given her something more dire to worry about.
Having seen a bit of the world, I had lost my taste for attending the local university. I now wanted to study languages in a Grande École (like an Ivy League school) in Paris and, on top of that, to take a literary track at the Sorbonne at the same time. It was unusual and really an insane workload. My parents were not at all keen on the idea of Paris: if I got in (hardly a given, as the competition is legendary), it was going to be a big emotional and financial sacrifice to have me three and a half hours from home. So I had to campaign hard, but thanks in part to the obvious persistence of my raw nerves, in the end they let me go back to Paris for the famously grueling entrance exam. I passed, and in late September I moved to Paris. My parents always wanted the best for me.
.... |
|
| View all 14 comments |
Lily Burana, Washington Post Book World, USA
<2007-11-13 00:00>
It’s hard not to be enlivened by a [weight-control] book that celebrates both chocolate and bread, and espouses such wisdom as ‘Life without pasta? Perish the thought. |
Miriam Wolf, San Francisco Chronicle, USA
<2007-11-13 00:00>
The perfect book for the more literate dieter... A blueprint for building a healthy attitude toward food and exercise... Full of down-to earth advice... We’d all be thinner (and happier) if we followed it. |
Marie Claire (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-13 00:00>
You’ve heard it before... But somehow, when the advice comes from Mireille Guiliano, you actually listen. A perfect, slim (and slimming) read for dieters and bon vivants alike.
|
Kim Hubbard, People (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-13 00:00>
Ah, Paris, the ideal destination for museum-hopping, couture shopping–and quick weight loss? Mais oui, insists Mireille Guiliano... For those who can’t hop a plane whenever their zippers won’t close... her new memoir-cum-‘nondiet’ book [is] filled with slimming secrets. |
View all 14 comments |
|
|
|
|
