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French Girl Skinny

How do French do it eating all that cheese??

Ariadne Schulz
9 min readOct 29, 2020
Photo by Chris Hardy on Unsplash

Minimalist yet fashionable and effortlessly chic the French girl removes her Chanel sunglasses from her Prada bag and artfully messy but somehow also coiffed hair streaming behind her heads out for her two hour lunch break at a nearby café. At four she might stop for a quick pastry and coffee, and all these meals would be incomplete without wine and cheese. And yet she fits easily into a size two feminine suit. How does she do it?

Well, I’m afraid to bust your bubble fellow fat Americans, but she doesn’t. There’s a few things about the French girl stereotype we have right, but not a lot. French do tend to have a lower BMI than Americans. French do consume a lot more wine than Americans. And French are experts at taking long lunches whilst maintaining productivity. But as with all things, it’s a bit more complicated than the movies might suggest.

As with a Japanese diet, French tend to eat a greater variety of foods than Americans. There is a higher volume of vegetables in the French diet and soup is quite common. Unlike with the Japanese diet I don’t think an American would be able to successfully adopt the French diet for weight loss, but let me try to demystify a few points.

Petit déjeuner

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Ariadne Schulz
Ariadne Schulz

Written by Ariadne Schulz

Doctor of Palaeopathology, rage-prone optimist, stealth berserker, opera enthusiast, and insatiable consumer of academic journals.

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