The intense pleasure of yoghurt

As a stylish Frenchwoman, yoghurt is a food I like to consume a lot of.  When made properly, it is an absolutely delicious food that a French woman can't get enough of (if one ignores the fact that she has a dainty appetite, tee hee).  Mireille Guiliano wrote a post about the magic of yoghurt at http://frenchwomendontgetfat.com/content/magic-yogurt .

As I have said in a previous post, low-fat low-sugar low-flavour foods are a poor strategy when it comes to dieting and I much prefer the strategy of eating a dainty Frenchwoman's portion of the real thing.  There is another disadvantage to low-fat low-flavour yoghurt that helps explain why a French woman will not touch the stuff.  If one dips one's spoon into low-fat low-flavour yoghurt and lifts it out again, the so-called yoghurt tends to dribble off the spoon.  With real full-fat yoghurt, if one does the same, one can turn the spoon upside-down and it will stay on the spoon.  A Frenchwoman eats her yoghurt by turning the spoon upside-down like this, slowly inserting it into her mouth upside-down, closing her eyes, slowly withdrawing the spoon whilst pouting and keeping her lips gently pressed against the spoon and gaining a sensation of pure pleasure in the process.

I wouldn't know personally, given that I go for artesanal producers and the closest thing to a supermarket I am willing to enter is Le Bon Marché.  However, from what I have heard, the brands of yoghurt that appear in French supermarkets that also appear in Anglo-Saxon supermarkets tend to have different formulations, i.e. the full-fat varieties appear in French supermarkets.

Obviously, the last part is impossible if it is low-fat low-flavour yoghurt, MDR.  Only the highest quality of yoghurt is sufficient to cause someone with a refined palate such as a Frenchwoman to gain a sensation of pure pleasure in this way.  For this reason, if one wants to be effortlessly thin, but still gain pleasure from eating yoghurt (i.e. from the taste, rather than one's belly being stretched), one has to select the finest yoghurt the way a Frenchwoman would do.

Firstly, one should always go organic.  A Frenchwoman's refined palate can detect anything unnatural a mile off.  Secondly, one should buy from the farm gate whenever possible.  A Frenchwoman's refined palate much prefers yoghurt that is artesanal and make by the hands of a skilled craftsman.  If one lives within a city, one should pay someone to drive or travel via TGV to a parkway station (Avignon TGV and Aix-en-Provence TGV being examples of parkway stations) to travel to a farm where artesanal yoghurt is produced, rushing it back into the city without delay.  Real yoghurt does not have unnatural preservatives in it to make it last longer: - a Frenchwoman's sophisticated palate (which can detect such things with the greatest of ease) will cause her to wince when it passes her lips.

So there you have it: - a Frenchwoman knows that yoghurt is something that needs to be done properly if one is to get maximum pleasure from it.

Low-fat low-sugar low-flavour

One of the things the gormless Anglo-Saxon world just won't learn is that if one wants to lose weight, low-fat, low-sugar, low-flavour foods are not the way to go.  They have been prevalent in Anglo-Saxon nations for a long time and have not made much of a dent, if any, in the obesity rate.  There is a saying about insanity being when one does the same thing over and over again and expects different results!

A French woman knows that if one wants to be impossibly perfect and thin like us, it is no good going for low-fat variants: - what is necessary is to have an impossibly dainty appetite like us.  A French woman prefers dainty portions of the real thing: - the flavour gives her extremely refined taste buds a sensation of pure pleasure that goes a long way to making her feel full (I couldn't find a Wikimedia Commons picture showing the sensation I wanted), so there is no picture between here and the next paragraph.

I just adore real yoghurt: - there was once an occasion on my travels to the USA when I was at the breakfast buffet and I picked up a yoghurt without thinking, but what I didn't know was that it was phoney low-fat yoghurt!  I was so disgusted by the taste that I had to rush to the toilet, where I nearly threw up!  I had to wash my mouth out, but needed to go back to the table to do this, as I don't like water that is not pure.  Tap water will not do even for washing out my mouth!  Real yoghurt is one of life's great pleasures.

There is an article on Wikipedia about something called the French paradox, which concerns how French people eat a large amount of saturated fats than many other nations, but still have a very low heart disease rate.  A French woman knows that real saturated fats are much less bad than severely unnatural trans fats that are found in many foods today.

A French woman will also not do artificial sweeteners, such as sucralose, glucose syrup etc.  A French woman treats sweet foods as being occasional treats and knows that artificial sweeteners are no good, as they prolong one's taste for sweet foods.  Also, even though many of them are more powerful per gram than sugar, they often load the person eating them up with calories, but without making them full.  A French woman much prefers a dessert that is only as sweet as it needs to be to cleanse her palate of the previous course: - this might be sprinkled with a small amount of sugar only.  Also, a French woman much prefers to eat natural foods.  What does this mean when it comes to sugar?  It means that she much prefers muscovado sugar, knowing that this is closer to how nature intended it (the word "refined" does not always have good connotations to a French woman) and that unrefined sugar preserved more of the nutrients such as mineral salts, phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron etc.  The picture below shows the difference: - the one on the right is brown sugar and the one on the left is muscovado sugar.

In summary, a French woman much prefers dainty quantities of the real thing, with its rich flavours, rather than large quantities of flavourless food.  As silly Americans would say, I'm like helloooooooooo, earth to America!  Low-fat low-sugar low-flavour foods do not help!