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.