A friend sent a link to an article reviewing the book that’s triggered the latest food craze, French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure . The whole article is worth a read, but this caught my attention most:

…while they may be admirably successful at staying thin, French women are not necessarily more balanced in their attitudes about food. While many people think of eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia as an American problem, they are, as far as can be measured (and these statistics should always be taken with some degree of skepticism), equally prevalent in France. In the United States, somewhere between 0.5 percent and 3.7 percent of women will be anorexic in their lifetimes, while 1.1. percent to 4.2 percent will suffer from bulimia. Between 2 percent and 5 percent of Americans binge eat. Among young French women, an estimated 1 percent to 3 percent are anorexic; 5 percent are bulimic; and 11 percent have compulsive eating behaviors. Certainly, young French women today are as interested in eating disorders as their American counterparts. While Guiliano enjoys her publishing success here, a quite different book is in the spotlight in France: a memoir of bulimia called Thornytorinx. (The title is an anatomical name for the digestive tract.) The book has been favorably covered by the French press, and its author, a 25-year-old actress named Camille de Peretti, appeared last weekend on one of France’s most popular talk shows.

–Kate Taylor, “French Women Do Too Get Fat“

The other glaring concern that raises my ire is the incessant focus on women and thinness. Do men not need to take care of their bodies and monitor the state of their physique? This book is as sexist as that pablum published in the 1990s — The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right — which unfortunately metastasized into several volumes. Ugh.