Why french women don't get fat

[Heswall]

Please somebody tell me the leek soup thing works, I may throw up soon and am starving.
TIA

bettybat - It sounds like you are intolerant to wheat. Many of us aren't, and don't have any tummy pains, bloating etc with a diet that includes bread, pasta, and rice.

Frankly, I can't imagine many worse fates than having to cook with coconut oil (rather than olive oil )and eat lamb burger with pistachio pesto, but to each their own.

cote my kids are at a catholic school in just outside paris. They are a definite breed (missed the post on catholic french). They are all stick thin inspite of having often 4 or 5 kids, are well groomed, and dress classily but soberly and pretty much the same. I honestly don't know how they do it some are wealthy some less so but they do not have nannies etc and they do not look wrecked by ,babies, toddlers etc. They do not have wine with every meal although I don't know if there is an only once a week rule. It is a definite club and hard to break into (unless one is catholic and french of course). Sorry seem to have gone off track here.

CdA I don't know where in PACA you live (Nice, at a guess, if you know lots of frum Jews :)), but the only people I've ever met who drink wine with every meal are working class males over 50! None of my female friends drink at lunchtime (well, not the ones I have lunch with in any case, or the women that I see when I'm out at lunch!). I lived in Bandol for 8 years and even there, we only drank alcohol (yes, rosé) on Saturday night or Sunday lunchtime, never during the week!

In fact, I think the only times I've ever had wine every day, and certainly an apéritif each day, is on holiday! I think I'm pretty typical of my demographic (late 30s, cadre, Bac+5, citadine, 3 enfants scolarisés...)

Maybe we're talking about two completely different social groups, are you in a rural area? Because I've worked with plenty of middle-class, bourgeois Catholics in the various cities I've lived in! Maybe the habits you've seen since you've been in France are more specifically "France profonde" ?

My parents in law are france profonde and call themselves "paysan". My FIL has a glass or two with every meal but my MIL will just drink maybe one glass at lunch and nothing in the evening. My sisters-in-law hardly drink at all. I definitely drink more than them.

Yes, Hattie, my parents own a cottage in a rural area where I often take my kids for the weekend or in school holidays. Our friends there also refer to themselves as "paysans" :)

The middle-aged or older men all drink pastis every evening and wine at each meal, but even there, the women tend to stick to water, except at the weekend!

Cote I'm guessing that the wealthy women you know who are not Catholic are probably nouveau riche and don't have the bourgeois values I was talking about. There are certainly plenty about, though, in most big cities!

vitamin - I live in Monaco, which is as far away as you can get from "France profonde" as humanly possible. The wealthy French I know are not "nouveaux riches", either, since the only French who get tax advantage from living in Monaco are those who have been here since early 1960s, so the French women I know in their 30s and 40s are what you would call "old money". French women I know who live not in Monaco but around it have homes in St Jean Cap Ferrat, Villefranche, or Cannes and are quite wealthy. I don't know any French people from Nice.

Whenever we go out for lunch together, even for a pizza on the beach (especially on the beach) someone orders a bottle of wine. This is then shared, so one person might get a glass. And what we call "a glass of wine" around here is definitely not the completely full, huge water glasses of wine I have seen in the UK.

Still, ime, it is wrong to say that wealthy French women would have wine only about once a week, as a treat. What I see is often, possibly even every day, but in small amounts.

I don't reckon monaco lifestyle can possibly be compared to normal french lifestyle.

When I have lunch in my office canteen ( La Defense) I look longingly at the wine on offer but don't touch it as no-one else does... When my Parisian boss took a few of us out for dinner recently in Paris (all male & French except me), he looked at the wine list and said - 'I don't know whether to choose this one, or..' and I added 'Or two?' No-one else got the joke , and we had ONE bottle of wine between five people ... I went back to hotel & raised the mini bar

Yes, Hattie I'm agree! Monaco (and the surrounding area) is like a little bubble of opulence, that is pretty far removed from typical French life!

I was saying that I know quite a few wealthy French people who live in France (Cannes, St Jean Cap Ferrat, Villefranche, etc) but anyway.

Five women sharing a bottle of wine over a long lunch is hardly the Last Days of Pompeii, imho, regardless of their income levels.

MrsGuy your experience fits very closely with mine for the many years I lived and worked in Paris (and other cities). In fact, I worked at the HQ of a big national bank in Paris for a while, and even the traders and "bankers" I hung out with were very restrained! They would order extremely expensive champagne, but only drink one glass each! Very different from what I know of the city bankers in London!

The French attitude definitely favours quality over quantity :)

Oh and I'm not sure I would call people who became rich (and relocated to Monaco to avoid paying tax on their newly-found wealth!) in the 1960s "old money" :o

In France, old money comes with a "nom à particule" and dates from pre-revolution times! Anything post-revolution is petit bourgeois at best and certainly "nouveau riche" if made in the 20th century!

Not all bourgeois familes are wealthy, these days. Many had to sell off their country seats to pay inheritence taxes and now live a fairly average, middle-class lifestyle in Paris/Versailles/Lyon/Bordeaux etc (whilst retaining their very bourgeois values and culture)!

So when you were talking about "French upper classes" (who are "staunchly Catholic"), you were referring to families who have made their money before mid-15th Century, and then possibly lost it all? Sorry, that was not obvious to me, at all. I have never heard of any country's "upper classes" being so narrowly defined, nor have I ever heard of the term "old money" being used to define people who have little left.

Are these the same French women who "rarely drink alcohol - maybe an occasional glass of wine with a meal out on a Saturday night"? If so, I now understand the difference in our perception.

Well, the revolution was in the late 18th century, not mid 15th :)

And yes, that is the upper class I referred to who are still practising catholics.
The middle classes also retain a lot of these values and culture, without the strict religious practice in most cases.

It's not really such a small group - most of my friends and acquaintances (and pretty much everyone I've ever worked with) have belonged to one of these two groups, who represent a large chunk of the (urban) population here!

The working classes are not generally religious at all and mainly consist of blue-collar workers in cities and agricultural workers in more rural areas.

There is obviously a separate social group in the greater Monaco area I've never encountered, however, and I'm intrigued that their values are so different from similar socio-economic groups in the rest of the country!

Have you ever worked in France, btw? or do you just hang out at the beach all day drinking rosé? I'm surprised you haven't come across the type of people I've been referring to, as they are pretty easily identifiable (and they tend to be found in managerial jobs in lots of firms). Like Hattie said, they are quite homogeneous and follow a fairly formal dress code etc.

Have you seen the film "Neuilly, sa mère"? It's something of a caricature, but it gives a fairly good idea of the lifestyle of the upper classes in France.

Oh come on, Neuilly sa mère is all about the nouveaux-riches in (clue is in the name) Neuilly, not the Catholic bourgeoisie!

Have you seen it? It's set in a Catholic school and the uncle Stanislas whatever is an aristocrat with a triple-barrelled "nom à particule"! The way the characters are dressed is quite typical of that milieu, too.

It's not quite Versailles but there are plenty of "bourges" in Neuilly :)

Yes I've seen it. There may have been particules in the film but I have never met any Catholic with a particule who behaves in the self-absorbed, vulgar, dysfunctional and exploitative fashion of the family portrayed in the film.

The portrait of Le Racing (which also featured prominently in Neuilly sa mère) was also all wrong!

Versailles and Neuilly are about 180° apart, by the way...

I suspect that if I had to work less weeks in the year than I do, had plenty of access to childcare, and had a shorter commute I too would be healthier, and that would include slimmer.

I agree, a busy, hardworking life does not leave much room for taking care of oneself.

It would also be nice to live within easy reach of the countryside at all times for long walks, rambles and skiing.

Odd that nobody comments that German women don't get fat

I agree about the vulgarity! My Catholic friends tend to be quite restrained and discreet socially, too.

I've never been to Le Racing, so can't say on that. But I've known quite a few well-to-do families from the west of Paris (15è, 16è, 17è and close suburbs) and whilst the atmosphere is quite different from Versailles, they are still pretty visible there...

I think you are lumping the affluent, the Catholic, old French families and the educated in a single basket. There are massive cultural differences ("the atmosphere") in segments that include some, but not all, of those groups.

There is still a very sizeable segment of super-Cathos in France who tend to have particules (or at least in their lineage), more children than they can afford, like Catholic education and are pretty impoverished, but whose legacy and educated bourgeois aura makes them look "upper middle class" to unsuspecting foreigners. One is never invited to their homes which are way too modest to accommodate visitors.

A friend of mine who for miscellaneous reasons ended putting one of her children in a Catholic school in western Paris tells a hilarious story of a family at the school with eight children, despite the parents sleeping in bunk beds in the sitting room due to lack of space...