l 'art de vivre

A couple of years ago the book, French Women Don't Get Fat by Mereille Guiliano came out and after seeing Madame Guiliano on Oprah I bought the book. Well, sweet Cindi said that she wanted the book so when the time came that I needed a little something for her I gifted her with French Women Don't Get Fat which left me with a vague knowledge of the contents but not much more. In 2006 Madame came out with another book, French Women For All Seasons
so I bought it and loved reading every delicious word of it but that was as far as it went. Then last summer I stumbled upon her website and signed up at a cost of $19 something a month for her menus, support forums and advice from Madame herself, but with the wedding and everything else going on I never really had time to get into it and was about to unsubscribe when the Sunday after Thanksgiving I stepped on my scale and about fainted when I saw the offending #.

Miraculously, that same morning John had said, 'I'm going on a diet'. So that was all it took for me to log onto FWDGF, download the weekly shopping list and away we went off to Papa Joe's
to stock up for the week. My Italian husband was a bit nervous when I kept talking about all this French food I was about to embrace but I assured him that he only had to eat what he wanted and there would be plenty of meat and veggies which he adores thankfully.

It has been 5.5 days now and with Madame's approach to 'the art of living' I have taken off the awful holiday weight and started to learn a whole new appreciation for the pleasure of food. I am optimistic that with this new found knowledge and the exercise program which is all about the French way to move, there is a chance that I might finally get rid of those extra **lbs. that have crept up over the last 20 years.

I still haven't even thought about Christmas decorating yet but have enjoyed looking at a couple of blogs to help ease us into the season. Our company Christmas party is tomorrow night so that will clear the schedule a bit when we get back from up north to get busy next week with at least the tree. I hear MP got a pretty blanket of snow last night.