My Diet, C'est Moi

I’ve just bought a coffee, and now, seated at my table for one, I am pulling my book from my bag, when I notice that the woman at the next table — also alone—is shyly watching me from behind the covers of her open book. We smile and exchange tentative comments about our reading selections.

My book is Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ll be teaching in another hour. My book is a dystopian study of a postmodern, neo-colonial world, in which the women wear color-coded baggy gowns—kind of like Sarah Silverstein’s Emmy gown, but with even more material. I’m much more interested, however, in my neighbor’s choice: Mirielle Guiliano’s French Women Don't Get Fat Cookbook. She is three-quarters of the way through and tells me that it is riveting and—the most important point—helpful. It is only later—much, much later, after I have endured contemplating what I call the leek-soup-trial—that I will reflect upon the fact that this scene took place in McDonalds.

I bought the book in the same spirit that I have bought other self-help books, which is, I imagine, the same spirit that impels most buyers and is the driving force behind such books’ ascendancy to the top of best seller lists. In other words, even while part of me knew that this book would probably end up on the shelf next to The South Beach Diet, Stop Smoking For Good, and How to Make a Million a Month Through Freelancing, another part of me thought, This is the one that will change my life. I will read this book, follow its message, and achieve everlasting happiness through thinness. And not just any thinness – French thinness.

The book is charmingly seductive. The lure begins with the title—not just in the hook of “French Women,” but with the subtitle: “The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.” “What peaches and penumbras!” as Allen Ginsberg says in “A Supermarket in California”! I was ready to be taken, and the Overture didn’t disappoint. The promise was the standard one: this book, this method, is different. The author’s tone, however, was so wry yet kind, so understanding, so French, that I eagerly lapped up her words—some of which were actually in French. And so I continued, confident that not only would I emerge from this reading experience as a new thinner (chicer) self but as someone who had an arsenal of clever bon mots to season conversations at lunch in my college’s bistro. And all was well, for the first nineteen pages, in which the author described how a semester in America made her fat. C’est vrai, I thought smugly.

The work began on page 20, midway in Chapter 2: “La Fille Prodigue.” First, I was to keep a food diary for three weeks, which I resolved to begin the very next day, so that I wouldn’t have to confess to what I had been eating as I read: several generous servings of an Entenmann’s Raspberry Danish. And all, I’m convinced, would have continued to go well, if I had just paused there and gone on to other things, like baking cupcakes or conjugating French verbs or reading something more cheerful, like Madame Bovary. Instead, I continued reading Chapter 2.

The first truly ominous note came in the final paragraphs, as the text segued with little warning from the promise that “Gradually even my indulgences would become savvier” to the appearance of the phrase “tough weekend.” There were, I noticed, no French phrases now—only the introduction of what Guiliano called “Magical Leek Soup.” The first stage in a life of drop-dead-gorgeous French thinness, it turned out, was a commitment to consume—for 48 hours—nothing but leek soup “and all the water you want.” (Should any readers be inspired to try this, be warned that “magical” here is a euphemism for diuretic; don’t attempt this diet on a weekend that you’re planning to spend in Paris). Perhaps this is why so many French women still smoke: it’s the thought of sipping from an endless vat of this soup that drives them to it.

I went so far as to purchase an alarmingly large bunch of leeks, which took up a good portion of a shelf in the refrigerator. And that was as far I got – with the recipe, with the book, with my dream of my newly empowered French self. Each time I opened the refrigerator to contemplate my leek-infused destiny, I would help myself to a glass of the rose sitting on the top shelf (French women do still drink wine, don’t they? I don’t know what Guiliano has to say on that subject—I never reached Chapter 3). When the bottle was empty, I placed the leeks in the trash and the book in the donation pile for the library’s next book sale.

This story isn’t as tragique as it may seem. I have not entirely abandoned my quest to become a European femme fatale; I have merely changed countries. Deciding that French is so avant-hier, I have chosen a new role model, a Swedish girl: Lisbeth Salander. I’ve even been keeping a food diary for her and moi-meme—fish, wine, and lots of cheese sandwiches—and so far everything’s working out just fine.

Carolyn Foster Segal teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College and is a contributor to the Observer column of The Chronicle of Higher Ed.