Day 1

I can't do leek soup as recommended in the book, but I do have a pot of celery soup from last week, begging to be eaten. I made it from whole celery stalks (tops and all) and chopped onion sautéed in butter and olive oil. To the vegetables, I added sea salt and fresh cracked pepper, as well as a couple of shakes of curry powder. Once all the veggies were softened in the pot, I added organic vegetable stock and allowed it to come to a boil. After it simmered for awhile, I pulsed batches in my blender and added a touch of half and half for some extra creaminess. The soup kind of reminds me of a watery version of saag paneer (minus the paneer) which probably means it's not as low cal and healthy as it should be. Nonetheless, it's ready made, full of vegetables, and delicious. I think that qualifies it for the starter meal of my foray into Frenchification.

“Most Americans eat at least 10 to 30 percent more than needed, not

to survive but to satisfy psychological hunger.”

                                                                        -French Women Don’t Get Fat, pg. 8-9

Yes.  Yes, we do.  Or at least I do.  And it’s what I did yesterday. 

My eating wasn’t as extreme as what it could have been.  I didn’t clean my plate despite a strong urge to do so and I didn’t have dessert (at least not after dinner…).  But my choices, both at dinner as well as the rest of the day, were not figure-friendly.  Especially not for someone who allegedly wants to lose weight.

Generally speaking, I have lost my equilibrium.  Between working/commuting 11 hours per day, 5 days a week, spending 4 hours or so, with my baby once I get home in the evening, catching up on chores during the weekends and sleeping (a basic necessity, no?), I don’t have any time for myself.  More specifically, I don’t have time to even think about myself anymore.  I rarely look in the mirror these days other than to ensure my hair isn’t sticking straight up and I don’t have sleepies in my eyes.  My wardrobe, while prodigious and varied, is limited on a daily basis to one of three pairs of slacks and a couple of nursing tops.  Stealing 20 minutes for myself seems like a luxury these days, one I often can’t afford.  And, I guess, as a result, I eat rich foods for comfort or, I eat excessively out of laziness.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all because of the baby.  I haven’t turned into a sloth because I’m now a mom.  It’s everything.  It’s work, which takes up nearly three-quarters of my waking hours; it’s the house we’re in the process of buying (7 months after moving into the house we’re currently renting, by the way!); it’s the side business we own which requires attention now and then to keep going; and yes, it is the baby too.  He’s at that stage where he wants to touch everything, do everything and go everywhere (on foot, of course) but can’t do any of it on his own.  As a result, my husband and I are continually escorting him, his tiny hands gripping our thumbs as he wobbles along our hard wood floors.  It’s so precious to watch, yet so painful on the back!

Each day, I promise myself that I will eat mindfully and only until I am satiated but not stuffed.  Yet each day, I overindulge at meals or snack excessively.  I don’t eat poorly; rather, I eat organic, locally grown fruits and vegetables, grass-fed beef we bought from a local farmer (a side of beef, in case you’re wondering, takes up an entire 7 cubic foot deep freezer!) and home-made desserts or Nutella.  I also love indulging in wine but, my consumption being limited these days of breastfeeding my son, that’s the least of my caloric transgressions.  The problem is the portion sizes and the omnipresence of snack food everywhere I look.

Tomorrow, I plan on initiating my French challenge.  Being the most quantifiable and measurable, my intent is first to tackle the excess baby weight that still stubbornly clings to my tummy.  I have seven weeks until Kauai and I’d like to make as much headway as possible during that time towards feeling comfortable in my own skin.  I don’t expect a miracle, but I do plan on dropping 10 pounds during that time and hopefully, fitting into my old bikinis once again.  While this may seem a superficial and vain opening to my French challenge, I actually think losing some baby weight before pursuing my other objectives (listed in my first post) may actually facilitate my later success.  I firmly believe that you have to take care of yourself and feel good about yourself before you can take care of others the way they deserve to be taken care of.  I took great pains to pamper myself while pregnant so that I had ample reserves from which to draw while the baby was young and very demanding of my time.  Well, those reserves are dwindling and something has to change.  It has been 9 months since my son was born and I need to replenish.  Likewise, my husband and I invested a lot of time into our marriage before we had the baby, the hope being that the foundation we lay beforehand would see us through the early, bleary-eyed months of first-time parenthood.  It has, and we are still going strong.  But again, something has to change.  First things first, though.  First, I need to carve some mental space for my needs and my replenishment and then, back to my old self again, I can attend to the slowly waning health of my marriage.

Today was not a French sort of day. It was anything but...

Kauai was the last time I felt hot.  Not temperature hot.  Hot hot.  Good-looking-in-a-bikini hot.  Turning-heads-at-the-beach hot.  That kind of hot.  That was back in 2010 (immediately before I got pregnant).  My “hotness” resulted from an unforgiving pursuit of shedding every possible pound of excess weight before I got pregnant.  I weighed 146 lbs on that trip to Kauai.  Today I weight 164.

This August, we’re going back to Kauai.  It will be my first opportunity to don a bikini since the baby and frankly, I’m not ready.  I’m not physically ready, nor mentally ready.  That’s one of the desired outcomes from this French challenge.  Namely, a beach ready body and the mind to go with it or, in other words, I want to lose the baby weight once and for all but also be able to accept my new body for all of its imperfections without hiding behind a Hawaiian shirt the whole time.  Not an easy task…

This is why I turn to Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don’t Get Fat, who proposes to help American women live “bien dans sa peau” (i.e. feel comfortable in one’s skin) the French way.  This involves eating mindfully and in moderate portions, including indulgences like chocolate cake.  It encourages women to eschew fat-free, sugar-free and diet foods in general, on the premise that eating foods that don’t taste good compels one to eat more in an effort to feel wholly satisfied.  Instead, she suggests the reason French women are slim, despite avoiding all diet foods, is that they eat exactly what they want, when they want it, but that they do so in moderation.  Here’s my struggle with this:  what does “moderation” mean exactly???  Does that mean I can have cake every day as long as it’s only one slice of cake or does moderation mean that I can only have cake once a week as a treat?  Or maybe, moderation means that I can only have cake at special occasions but that I can eat it cheerfully, without giving it a second thought…?  I have no clue!

The bottom line is that it’s all relative.  What is moderation for a French woman can feel downright ascetic to an American woman, especially one who is still breast feeding and has gotten accustomed to eating however much she wants, whenever she feels hungry.  The reality is, the French don’t eat very much.  Period.  Even pregnant, French women do not “indulge” the way we American women do when we are pregnant.  They just keep eating the way they always do, just maybe, ever so slightly, more.  Pamela Druckerman notes this phenomenon in Bringing Up Bebe, stating that remarkably, most French women look a lot like the “pregnant” women we see on TV, skinny arms and legs, with a perfectly formed baby bump.  None of that double chin, swollen ankles, and general puffiness we American moms-to-be seem to be plagued by.

The What and the Why...

It seems like everywhere I turn these days, I run into yet another book or movie concerning something French.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.  The reason I’m running into all this Francophilic “stuff” is because I’m looking for it.  I studied French for 2 years in middle school, as well as a combined 8 years between high school and college.  Yet despite having studied French for a whole decade, essentially half of my time on earth by the time I graduated college, I never actually got around to living in France.  In fact, I have never lived abroad.  Ironic, considering that I was born overseas and lived for 18 years in the most diverse melting pot in the world (NYC).  Unfortunately, in college, I was too boy crazy, too wrapped up in the relationship of the moment, to tear myself away for a whole semester, even to live in an amazing place like France.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!  But unfortunately, water under the bridge. 

So, here I am, 33, married with a new baby, at the tail end of an incredible career, about to live with my parents (long story), and all I seem to do in my spare time (which, by the way, consists of 20 blissful minutes both ways to work, sitting on a DC metro) is read books on my Iphone or watch movies on my Ipad on all things French, sometimes without even realizing it.  This fact hit me today as I read page after page in the latest book I’m reading, The United States of Arugula, by David Kamp.   The book is not about French cuisine; rather it is a book about the mid-twentieth century rise of the American food establishment.   However, despite the title and plot-line, all I’ve been reading about thus far is “French cookery”.  More specifically, the way French cuisine influenced American palates after World War II.  I’m sure that’s no surprise to anyone; the French have always had a corner on the market when it came to food.  But child rearing?  The last book I read, Bringing Up Bebe, by Pamela Druckerman, talks about the universal truths of French parenting and how different they are from the schizophrenic tenants that dominate American parenting.  Who knew?  There is a French way to parent.  Interesting…  That got me thinking back to the last book I read on something French, a book I still had on my bookshelf, French Women Don’t Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano.  A book about pleasure eating and portion control, Guiliano educates her non-French audience how to maintain a trim figure by eating cake (but not too much).  Again, who ever thought one could lose weight by eating cake, so to speak?  Full of cultural norms that, on the surface appear paradoxical, the French way seems to speak to us Americans.  Or maybe just to me… Either way, whether I like to admit it or not, I’m hooked on all things French and I might as well accept it. 

So accept I will.  I’ve decided to create for myself a 365 day French “challenge” whereby I apply various French cultural norms to my own life (and that of my family, by default, I guess).  I will have to go about it in stages because frankly, I barely have time to brush my teeth, let alone upend my daily life.  The plan is to apply the “French way” to 4-6 areas of my life that could use improvement.  Specifically, lose the baby weight (I still have 20 lbs to lose nine months post-partum – no judging!), improve my marriage (again, post-baby alone time seems so hard to find these days…), wrangle the increasingly forceful  and dynamic personality of my infant son into a slightly more French (read: well mannered) version of toddlerhood, and discover a sense of work-life balance which seems to be wholly lacking in my DC-esque rat race existence.  Four areas for now, with room to grow to six if necessary. 

The purpose of this challenge is to create positive change in my life but to do so gently.  Too often, I feel that we Americans are very brutal with ourselves when it comes to self-improvement.  At least I know I have not been kind to myself over the years, whether it has been excelling at academics as an adolescent, succeeding at work during my twenties, losing all excess weight before my first pregnancy, or even just the daily push to do, do, do during the day.  There has got to be a better way!  I’m tired, I don’t sleep well, my back hurts, my hips hurt, blah, blah, blah.  Of course, I’m tempted to blame someone or something else, but the reality is that I am the one who not being good to myself.  And I need to stop!  This is my (gentle) attempt to stop.