(The Sartorialist)

Throw everything you’ve ever heard about the beautiful figures of French women out the window. It’s a fallacy. If I have learned anything from my Parisian life it is that “French Women Don’t Get Fat” is misleading and puts French women on a diet pedestal.

Despite what you may think, each morning does not begin with a croissant or pain au chocolat in one hand and an espresso in the other, on the terrace of a café where Simone de Beauvoir philosophized with Sartre, while pausing between bites to puff from a cigarette. They may have a genetic predisposition to a slim frame but don’t be mistaken – most of them can’t get away with eating the way that the rest of the world thinks they eat. The preponderance of eating disorders, diet pills and legal addictive stimulants tells me that maybe American women shouldn’t be looking at Parisian women (because I get myself in trouble when I generalize and say French women) as models of healthy behaviors. They do use Diet Coke, coffee and cigarettes as a non-fat method of suppressing their appetites and they do talk about their bodies and weight with just as much compulsion and attention as their American counterparts.

I go to a gym where I see painfully anorexic women baring their midriffs, what is left of them anyway, working out for hours on cardio machines, just to put on their skinny jeans and designer tops and head out for a day of starvation. “French Women Don’t Get Fat” gave non-French women the impression that they could look like a French woman if they ate like them. And eating like them meant, no dieting, no snacking in between meals, drinking plenty of liquids and never going back for seconds. Apparently this was supposed to lead to the ability to maintain one’s weight all the while consuming astronomical quantities of bread, pastries and cheese. Get with reality! Parisian women, at least, are very calculative and picky about what goes in their bodies. With two powerful competing forces, the organic food trend (I say trend but not unfavorably… I encourage organic consumption) and the prevalence of fast food/Starbucks/junk, the French woman’s waistline is susceptible to most of the same dangers an American woman faces, great genes or not.

Yet it should be said that French women may, therefore, be thin but they do not necessarily have healthier or more balanced attitudes about food. In fact, 1-3% of the French are anorexic, 5% are bulimic, and 11% have compulsive eating behaviors; figures that have increased over the last fifteen years (Kate Taylor, 2005). This suggests that anorexia and bulimia do not require a widespread, openly discussed culture of calorie or carb-counting and devotion to the gym. Rather, they may take slightly different forms, depending on the prevailing national habits, but eating disorders arise wherever thinness is deeply valued and admired (Kate Taylor, 2005).

I will give them one thing. If they’re going to eat, it’s typically full fat, full carb meals but in smaller portions. While they do sell low-fat shredded cheeses and non-fat yogurt, it’s so artificial tasting that no one would want to stay on that kind of diet for long. It’s taken me awhile to accept that the lighter versions of foods that are sold in the US are not readily available here but I sure eat healthier than I did before. So either you get thin women who unabashedly fill their plates with vegetable lasagna and a tiramisu or those that consume artificial products and appetite suppressants in an attempt to look like a waif. It’s a sad reality, really.

So if you’re asking yourself what these women do eat, they eat a lot of everything or a lot of nothing but are always careful not to forget their cigarettes and canned carcinogens.