"Annabel Smyth" wrote in message
...
When I lived in France as a young adult, I lost over 20 lbs without even
trying. And kept them off for years. I think it's due to the very
different eating-habits over there - three meals a day, end of.

As a side note, off these three meals, the breakfast tends to be pretty
small. For most French people it's a cup of coffee and some bread and
butter. End of meal. The idea of eating proteins for breakfast sounds
disgusting to most people, even though some force themselves to do it under
the presure of dietitians. It's actuall funny if you check the French diet
boards. Plenty of people are posting tricks about how to manage to eat that
much food in the morning without feeling nauseous or how to manage to get
children to eat such a large breakfast. All because the dietitians/magazines
told them to. So much for the idea that you *have* to eat a whole meal for
breakfast to stay slim.
On the three meals a day deal, there are different successful patterns in
the world. Asia seems to do very well on much more than that. Japanese eat
two extra meals (10am and 4pm) and seem to do fine on that diet. Other
Asiatic countries practice snacking and do fine on them.

No snacks. None.

The 4pm snack is an almost official meal for kids, but many (not all) adults
drop it.
Besides, nutritionists now make a distinction between a snack and a
"collation" (small meal). A collation is just a snack that you eat while
being hungry and while paying attention to what you eat. Collations = good,
snacking = bad, according to them.

And yes, the majority of people in France still appear to have no need
to lose weight - I always feel grotesquely fat when I'm over there,
whereas in the USA I feel positively slender!

It's true that while visiting the USA, I felt positively slim. And I was in
relatively slim cities (NYC, SF). Also, I had to struggle to find clothes at
my size in France, but in the USA I could even find stuff that fitted me at
Gap! :-o Most fashionable brands here stop at XL, and your XL is more like a
XXL or XXXL here.

We eat because
the food is there, not because we are actively hungry for it.

That's what psychologists have called externalism. Slim people react from
inner stimuli (they're hungry, they stop being hungry) while obese people
tend to react from external stimuli (time to eat, there is food in front of
me, people are eating, a serving = size of my appetite).

But they have as many health
magazines as anywhere else, and they are as full of diet tips as any
other....

This is a recent phenomenon. I read a statistical study on it actually. In
just a few years, the number of articles concerning diets have multiplied
tenfold. Worse, they are becoming common in the press targetted towards
teenagers, while it was virtually unknown there a few years ago. There are
now even a few dieting articles in the men magazines, and this one is
totally new.