3 reasons why French women don’t get fat. The secret for eating for pleasure.
I don’t know about you but I envied those chic looking French Women, ever since I was a teenager, the way they dressed, the way they enjoyed real food, they don’t get fat, and they all seemed so teeny tiny.
When I moved to France in 2004 I was intrigued how the French culture had shaped these women to eat in a completely different style to how I had been taught. I even read several survey’s that showed that the French spent longer at the table than any other nation. I read several books on food and eating phycology ie ‘The Omnivores Dilemma‘ that used the French style of eating as the model for how we could all eat for a more healthy balanced life and body.
I have experienced first hand the length of time that a French Family will sit at the table, where as for me I just wanted it to be over and done with and clear up.
It was literally like chalk and cheese when I moved in with my French Boyfriend and his Oh So French ways. I remember our first date, we met at the Band Stand in the picture post card Village of St Jean de Luz and he had a large bag filled with picnic food which I was to discover later. A picnic with fresh warm just baked French baguettes, local red wine (from a very good year), to be served in glasses, lots and lots of all types of French cheese, and a home made salad just for me with cheese and a home made oil dressing. All to be enjoyed on a run on the beach watching the sun go down.
I had to pull myself up on every single belief I had about food and eating and gave myself a serious talking to that night. How was I going to do this? and dont get fat? I was on my Raw Food obsessive eating phase and he turned up to take me on a picnic on the beach with all these wonderful French goodies that I had rejected refused and missed for years. I was a no bread, no wine, no cheese or oil salad dressing girl, but I had to decide to thoroughly enjoy the evening as it was intended. And there all in one go had to get over my obsessive self control and my stubborn and fixed beliefs, about what was good and bad. And I relaxed and allowed myself to enjoy a slowly prepared and delivered romantic evening sitting on the beach, on a rug watching the sun turn orange and melt down behind the horizon.
The French really adore their food and the time spent to thoroughly enjoy it, there is a lesson for us all on how to enjoy food again. They consider the meal a time to spend with your family, to spend together and enjoy the riches of life, and they really revel in Cheese, wine and bread. The trick is the pleasure and that there is no judgment of what you thoroughly enjoy.
I realized with years and years of diets and starvation under my belt I was going to have to learn to eat all over again, if I was going to have a healthy relationship with food, don’t get fat, and one where my weight could balance out without any word of a diet of the mention of restriction or rations.
I was 12 years old when in my mother’s kitchen (I say her kitchen because she was in control here) sitting on the kitchen counter top eating a wedge of mature cheddar and drinking a hot chocolate after school, and being told off that one day, “don’t get fat” I would be fat and unloved if I carried on eating what I loved. This was what introduced and started with my diet mentality, which has literally ruined any pleasure that could be had with food, everything was labeled as good or bad, and had judgment, guilt, naughty or some other emotion being attached to it. I joined my mother in her diet world and went cold turkey over night from sugar, fat, I judged everything I consumed and the joy was gone.
Most women that I speak to already believe they know exactly what they have to do to lose weight. That is to reduce their intake and move more, and that there will be no gain without pain.
However most women find the real challenge to:
- Know what to eat
- How to stop eating when they are not hungry but stressed
- Dedicate the time to do the stuff that really matters, every day, week and month
Imagine enjoying a love affair with food, being able to enjoy a meal out with friends without feeling self-conscious or feeling judged how many times you’ve reached for extra cheese or desert?
And the true pleasure of eating really delicious food, without any after effects of digestive discomfort from guilt, shame or embarrassment?
Let’s face it we have been taught since we were children that there is only one way to reach peace and confidence in the body and that is to diet and restrict certain foods.
So why then and how do the French seem to get away with their rich sauces, fatty cheeses and the bread with every meal and don’t get fat.
After years of enjoying French food and wine and cheese and not gaining an inch, I know for sure that there had to be more to this than food in and food out. I had to learn how to eat again and I know you can too.
For 99 {6a14cc849908c46212f3d2c8a81eada984febec31535ea1cc7f55de4f8a4ba8e} of women there is one major cause of weight gain, and that is down to stress. The stress levels we live at unknowingly every day go onto trigger not only specific food cravings, and habits, but send signals for the body to protect us and store more and more fat.
This is why I am determined to help you learn how to eat again without dieting and have Peace with Food. Food is not the enemy here STRESS is.
Learn how to control Stress and get your body and mind back.
When you do you’ll have learnt:
- How to eat again and know what to eat, that’s right for you
- How to stop eating when they are not hungry but stressed
- Find the missing nutrient that stops your cravings and triggers the weight storage (hint its not what you think it is).
3 steps that every French woman follows, that will end your overeating and have you back in your body naturally dropping unwanted pounds.
Learn how to eat again without dieting.
Step 1 NO STRESS
Step 2 NO SCARCITY
Step 3 NO STAGNANCY
Here is what my years of being in France has taught me and what I now have embraced and follow the french way for myself. It has brought me to be in instinctive eater again and to just know when I have had enough. I feel fulfilled and enjoy every mouthful to its fullest. My weight is balanced and I really love my food, my life and my body.
So why don’t French women get fat? And can eating for pleasure, help women to lose weight? Absolutely YES!
The first habit of the French woman is ‘NO Stress’, especially around food and eating. The number one element that has you over eating, has your body creating fat and storing fat is STRESS
99{6a14cc849908c46212f3d2c8a81eada984febec31535ea1cc7f55de4f8a4ba8e} of the reasons a woman is creating and storing fat is due to her stress levels. So, it’s not your fault it’s the stress. When stress is involved there are several things that automatically happen in the body, that can’t be stopped unless you take some sort of peaceful stand and special action step.
When the body is stressed, it is in the ‘fight and flight’ mode, and releases several chemicals as well as key hormones, Cortisol being the main stress hormone that goes on to being responsible for the laying down of fat on your tummy. The body is actually trying to protect us from this perceived stress and reacting to how we feel.
Secondly the digestion shuts down and all the energy that is used for digestion and transforming what we eat into energy is stopped. Any energy that can be used is taken and redirected to the muscles for running or fighting.
The excess energy that was on hand to protect us that does never gets used for our flight or flight needs, is now toxic to us and needs stored in the safest place possible and goes where all toxins go, and that is in the fat cells.
When these hormones get released, It’s like having a house full of raging teenagers all craving beer and sugars doing everything bad and that they have been told not to do. Your body actually craves sugars when she is stressed because all the glucose and sugars have been used up with the stress.
So much potential damage is done with stress It is also good to note that the more frequently you experience stress, the more your body will habitually store and create for the next time, and if you do not release this stress it will still be there in your belly years decades later.
A diet has never been able to release this sort of fat because it needs released in another way entirely very different from diet or restriction and starvation and adding in more stressful exercise, just brings your body even more stress.
Remove the stress and your body will thank you with re gaining instinctively and naturally craving foods that , with the minerals and vitamins that she wants, needs and is lacking the most. This is called intuitive eating and comes from a place of having ‘peace with food’ and your body.
The diet has been a major cause for your body storing weight.
And so we come to the second reason French women never get fat.
The second habit of a French Woman is ‘No Scarcity’, especially around food and eating.
A French women does not comprehend the diet mentality, she is unlikely to have restricted her food, ever! Knowing instinctively when she was satisfied and had had enough and thoroughly enjoyed her meal, needing no extra treats because maybe she was stressed and she ate too fast and did not appreciate her meal. On the contrary au contraire The French woman has sensually enjoyed the whole experience. Voila!
French women never obsess about the fear around ‘don’t get fat’, they don’t snack either nor would they ever consider opening a packet of perfectly prepared in all the correct measured quantities of protein carbohydrate from a packet of dry food that you just add water to, that comes in 3 flavours. It’s laughable. Pourquoi? But the diet industry is huge and sells the notion of the perfect meal so bloody well to the busy woman, who is too stressed to eat properly, needs more energy and who never sits to eat or takes her time to nourish herself.
A woman who has been on diets, hundreds of diets (like myself since I was 12) and who is accustomed and has come to rely on the diet to re shape herself, is stuck in the mentality. The diet and scarcity mode has already done something nearly irreversible to her natural body’s natural instinctive response to food and her natural instincts top her environment. She has regularly limited, restricted and possibly starved herself, the body goes into a mode that expects her to do it again and again and begins to store food for times of scarcity.
Even if she tells her body that she can lose the weight the body’s senses do not trust her to be starving again some time soon.
Your body no longer trusts that there will be food supplied and her primitive response has kicked in to store every item of food you eat.
The only way to reverse this is to build trust so that the body can balance out and release the storage cupboards.
The third habit of a French Woman is ‘No Stagnation’, especially around food and eating.
The French women that I see have never waited and stayed still allowed that stagnant feeling to enter into their body. Waiting until they are feeling happy with their body to do something they love to do. No way, If they love something they do it, they eat or drink it, they create it. I call this the waiting –&– weighting game.
Women have put themselves last on the list for decades, considering it to be great mother, partner, daughter if they put their children’s needs first and their husband, their family, their career, but all the way along they got lost and put them selves on hold, on pause and in the idle busy mode. The stagnation set in and they don’t recognize what they even want any more. Forgotten joy, fun and high spirits drift off somewhere waiting for the right time to rise up.
Women who have gained weight sooner or later see it as that life got to heavy, and then they see that they are bored, fucked off and not in the relationship they fantasized about.
Getting your life back on track to feel alive in your body is an easy one by making that first step to not accept Stress, Scarcity or Stagnation.
This is not easy to do all alone. I can help you to know when your body is stressed, when you are restricting and rationing and in the scarcity mode and when you have stagnated and put others first
So if you have tried many, many things before and you were drawn to this Peace with Food program, like being on months and months of diets, and seeing a nutritionalists, taking supplements, treating yourself to eating one piece of black chocolate once a month, stressing, starving and struggling but none of these brought you the relief you are searching for, why not listen to what I have to say about this and what your body is wanting and needing you to hear, and discover a Peace with Food, learn how to eat again and take on the French way of no more dieting.
And because, I am dedicated to bring relief to women who have been suffering for a long time and have not found their solution. I am offering my ‘Peace with Food’ course at the seriously low price of £27.00 so that you can finally reclaim your body, and consciously re construct yourself from the inside out. I am determined to help you learn how to eat again without dieting. Food is not the enemy here STRESS is.
Learn how to control Stress and get your body and mind back.
You’ll get
- Learn how to eat again and dont’ get fat, know what to eat that’s right for you
- How to stop eating when they are not hungry but stressed
- Find the missing nutrient that stops your cravings and triggers the weight storage (hint it’s not what you think it is)
Hop on to my ‘Women Winning with Weight’ group to discover more, watch weekly information video’s and take the challenges I run in this group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/FionaRobertson/
Fiona X
Testimonial for Peace with food.
Pauline: I actually DID have a revelation this weekend – and it was huge: my weight has plateau-ed again despite the good food and exercise because I have discovered that it doesn’t feel safe being thin again. It was a HUGE revelation. Then following your advise I have identified two reasons why my body may think it’s unsafe to be thin, and I’ve been talking lovingly to it explaining why it’s safe and there’s no need to worry. I noticed a shift, and my digestion has shown me how much I was holding onto. I feel so much lighter and freer. Thank you for being there when I needed you.
Shirley: I’ve had a revelation this weekend! Since starting PWF(peace with Food) with you Fiona, it’s been getting easier and easier to get to that place of peace and hearing what’s going on in my body. The yes / no has been very helpful. Digestion really improving alot and elimination much more regular and easier too ( sorry for the detail!)…..coming home to my body and feeling peace wherever I am helps enormously.. It feels very good though to have an opportunity to create a new pattern of positive behaviour in me, so that I don’t suffer as a result. I am able to make new choice of how to feel and that frees me up form choosing food or wine as a treat when I feel bad. Wow Thanks! <3
