French Women Don't Get Fat?

In a culture where physical beauty is the greatest virtue, where a woman’s worth is evaluated by how she looks, where everywhere we look there are images of stick-thin women exalted as the ideal, how ironic is it that so many women are overweight. Most women devote their lives to diet and exercise, but find no long-term success. Constant dissatisfaction and unhealthy obsession is the result. If we are honest, this sad state of affairs affects our lives more than we care to admit.

Obesity seems to be largely a North American problem. Why is this I wonder? As my husband and I browsed through Indigo earlier today, I came across a book by Mireille Guiliano called French Women Don't Get Fat. Although she does not write from a Christian perspective, I resonated with some of her thoughts about having a balanced relationship to food and life. Her observations of French and American women are telling:

At the outset, let's state that French women simply do not suffer the terror of kilos that afflicts so many of their American sisters. All the chatter about diets I hear at cocktail parties in America would make any French woman cringe. In France, we don't talk about "diets," certainly not with strangers. We may eventually share a trick of two we've learned with a very close friend--some cunning refinement of an old French principle. But mainly we spend our social time talking about what we enjoy: feelings, family, hobbies, philosophy, politics, culture, and, yes, food, especially food (but never diets)...French women don't skip meals or substitute slimming shakes for them. they have two or three courses at lunch and then another three (sometimes four) at dinner.

It is interesting and almost surprising to hear of the gulf between the French and American attitude toward food and life. Why are Christian women so shaped by the warped strivings of our culture? I venture to say it is because we have not spent enough time meditating on wisdom living as laid out for us in the bible. More on this later.