Feeding on the vast success of French author Mireille Guiliano’s runaway hit, French Women Don’t Get Fat,  fellow French author Michel Montignac has written a book that appears to be simply about losing weight but really is about healthy eating and living.  The creator of the Montignac Method of dieting, the author’s basic premise is that all calories are not created equally.  If you want to start losing weight, he says, stop counting calories – consider the “glycemic index” (GI) of what you are eating instead.  The glycemic index measures the portion of carbohydrates that are converted into sugar.

In his view, the glycemic index is what counts because when you eat food with a high GI (51 or higher), then your pancreas will release insulin to remove the excess sugars your body receives from digesting carbohydrates.  The higher the GI of the food you eat, the more insulin must be released so that your blood-sugar levels will return to normal.  Those excess sugars are then stored as fat.  It is therefore essential for you to select foods according to their nutritional value and the effect that they will have on your metabolism.

Keeping this in mind, consider what Montignac and others have called the “American Paradox.”  Two-thirds of the U.S. population is overweight, and half of these are obese.   And the rate of obesity has been increasing for the last twenty years!  Yet, the paradox is that during the same time, American consumption of calorie-reduced and low-fat products has increased dramatically.  Clearly, the low-calorie, low-fat approach has not been the answer to American obesity.

So, why don’t French women get fat?  They eat cheese, chocolate, foie gras, and drink wine.  This should be a recipe for obesity if ever there were one.  But, as I can attest, French women generally remain far slimmer than women in America.  And the same is true for the men.  Moreover, unlike many diet-obsessed Americans, the French do not have a love-hate relationship with food.  They actually enjoy eating – and without guilt, eating is more enjoyable!

What the French do, either consciously or not, is eat low-GI and high-GI foods in combination.  We read in Montignac’s book that high-GI foods can be made less fattening by simply combining them with low-GI foods.  One example given is that of whole-grain bread, which has a relatively high GI, but which sees a dramatic (25%) drop in its GI when it is dipped in olive oil.  Who would have thought that bread would become less fattening when combined with olive oil?  But it actually does because the olive oil slows down the release of insulin produced in response to the carbohydrates found in bread.

Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw also wrote about this effect many years ago in their excellent diet book, The Life Extension Weight-Loss Book.  They, too, directed their readers to consider the weight-gaining effects of high-GI foods and urged that they be avoided or at least eaten in a more rational way.  Their advice included avoiding high-GI foods within one hour before bedtime so as to not suppress the body’s normal release of growth-hormone releasing factor 90 minutes after sleep starts.  I am sure that Durk and Sandy would approve of much written in this latest Montignac book.

Although a slim 192 pages, Montignac’s book is chock-full of helpful recipes as well as a glycemic-index table showing all of the common foods’ rankings on that table.  The author also helpfully divides his diet plan into a Phase I (weight-loss) stage and a Phase II (weight-maintenance) stage that is very practical, easy to follow, and takes account of the real world and the dangers of backsliding.

Most importantly, though, Michel Montignac shows us that the French way of eating is not just about weight loss, it’s even more about eating more healthily, with more fresh vegetables, fruits, and other low-GI foods.  By doing so, you will not only achieve and maintain your normal weight, as the author himself did; but you will also reduce cholesterol levels and lower your risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes.  And that is something we should all do, whether we are overweight or not.