27 September 2014: Corps Values

corps values

A week before we left for Paris, Joshua and I had a routine check-up with our primary care doctor to make sure everything was in working order before we took off overseas. (We have the same doctor and she had us in the room together for the appointment—something she'd never done before but which proved kind of interesting, once we got over how much it made us feel like old people.) At the end of the appointment, she said in all seriousness, "When you get over there, would you please tell me how French people stay so thin? We doctors have been trying to figure that out for years."

After the trite responses of "It must be all the walking" and "Well, they do eat a lot of fresh food," Joshua and I came to the same conclusion about the true way Parisians maintain their enviably sleek corps (bodies): "Smoking."

Cigarette use in Paris is so profound that you can't walk two steps without getting engulfed in secondhand smoke—either from a stinky traditional cigarette or from one of those new-fangled e-cigarettes that science is proving to be even more harmful than "normal" death sticks, thanks to the vapor that allows more malevolent particles to enter the lungs. (I'm not a fan of smoking, in case you couldn't tell. What someone wants to do to their own health is one thing, but I don't wish to share your life choices simply because I walk by. My, my, this soap box is slippery...)

The thing is, I don't remember the smoking being this prevalent the last time I lived here, or the last two times I visited. I remember being overwhelmed as a kid during my first visit, but I gradually got used to the general haze that permeated the atmosphere—to the point that it seemed odd to see people huddled outside bars and restaurants once I returned to California. Now that Paris has its own set of smoking laws that mostly prohibit puffing in public places (restaurants, stores, parks, etc.), maybe I'm encountering the effects of smokers being forced out onto the streets and into my path much more than I did in 1999. But whatever the reason, Paris has really gone up in smoke.

Lighting up certainly seems to be the prime method for maintaining one's Parisian sleek, considering it not only kills your appetite thanks to the stimulating nicotine hit, but also kills your sense of smell—and with it, taste—the more frequently you inhale. The practice also keeps your hands busy (and your body outside) instead of letting you get handsy with a baguette or a brasserie beefsteak.

My other suspicion is that French people (men and women) just don't eat all that much. A proponent of this theory, Mireille Guiliano, even published a book in 2004 called French Women Don't Get Fat, and it was a veritable Bible of how to eat like a French person—small amounts of quality ingredients—and still look lean and mean in your Dior trousers. Being the impressionable teen I was then, I snapped up the book, only to discover it was basically a reiteration of what had been ingrained in me since childhood: Everything in moderation. Though the age-old adage didn't save me from a bout with anorexia in high school and a subsequent weight gain my first year of college, I'd like to think that since that time, I've naturally subscribed to the edict of "Give your body what it wants."

But I've noticed something about Parisian women during my daily study of their habits: they do eat. I frequently see slender young women marching down the sidewalk gnawing a baguette sandwich the size of their fashionable handbag. I've even seen willowy business women tucking into hearty brasserie meals of entrée, main dish, side dish, salad and dessert—with a plate of decimated bread and a half-empty wine glass nearby. They drink wine, they eat chocolate, they enjoy bread...so what gives?

Another thing I've noticed is the prevalence of products promising to aid in minceur—weight loss. Every other page in a French magazine or poster in a pharmacie window is an ad for a pill or a liquid or a powder or a cream that promotes rapid weight loss, complete with the striking before-and-after photos I'd only associated with those terrifying Hydroxycut ads in America before now. I've also noticed that the tone of these ads is nothing short of withering: there's an implication that if you stopped to read this, you're already too fat—just buy this [cream, powder, liquid or pill] to regain your "real" (read: thin) beauty.

While America could widely be considered the kingdom of fat shaming—it sure feels like it, if you've ever lived there—we also still manage to be the most obese country in the world (according to the most recent list published by The Lancet Medical Journal). But the difference is that American ads seem to target their audience with an inclusive if not condoning attitude: "Do you want to get in shape and feel amazing? Do you want to look as awesome as this handsome athlete bounding across the screen? Then get off the couch, call this number and let's DO THIS!"

The French tactic, on the other hand, is decidedly more subtle, but somehow more cutting. There's a disdain to the language in magazines when discussing weight loss, as if to say, "If being skinnier is not on your list of priorities, don't even bother looking at these clothes. They're not meant for the likes of you."

So imagine growing up in a culture that is simultaneously exultant about how delicious [insert animal body part here] is when prepared in a [insert complex food form here] and yet reminds you on a daily basis that you're worthless if you're not thin and impossibly tan—though God forbid you ever show an ounce of effort lest you spoil that chic cloak of mystery that's draped casually on your narrow, bronzed shoulders.

With that kind of constant pressure, who wouldn't want a cigarette?

And then I stumbled upon something truly funny in a bookstore in the chi-chi-est shopping mall in Paris, Le Bon Marché. There, amid the novels from abroad and the thick fashion books that are heavier than the models inside was this little tome, entitled: Sushi Slim, ou Comment Garder La Ligne à la Japonaise. (Rough translation: Sushi Slim, or How to Maintain the Line of the Japanese Woman.) 

Apparently, the Americans look to the French for lessons in thinness, and the French look to...the Japanese.

Which just seems to prove that no one really has the secret to lifelong litheness, no matter where they're from. Whether it's cigarettes, fresh food, lots of bread, lots of walking—or lots of sushi—we're all just muddling through the best we can. 

I hope my doctor isn't too disappointed.