I got several interesting comments yesterday on what it’s like to eat with Thin People and decided to dub my cousin & her husband “Mr & Mrs Skinny”. Based on your inspiration, I now have a secret mission while I am around them - I am recording their food behavior to see how close it is to Dr Hope & my other notions of Low Stress Weight Loss.

Can’t tell you too much about their breakfast and lunch, because they set out from my house without breakfast to go exploring the city (and find a bakery, according to my cousin Mrs Skinny, who said “I’m in Paris, I’m having a croissant”).

Having the Skinnies in the house did make me more conscious myself. I had a very good food day on my own during the day before meeting up with them in the evening and for dinner out. I started my day with my muesli mix, which really is delicious and healthy and fast as long as I’ve had the presence of mind to prepare it the night before.

I got hungry for lunch around 1:30 and decided to use up my only old vegetable, a small cabbage. I might be weird, but I’ve always liked cabbage, so I stir fried it w some shallots and butter and threw in some frozen peas. Voila, lunch. I was thinking of trying to find some protein to make it more filling, but the butcher is still closed so we don’t have much. I had bought a nice goat’s cheese at the market and had some fruit and nut bread in the pantry so I made myself three small open-faced sandwiches of the bread, a thin spread of goat cheese, and thin sliver of pear on top. Delicious, and very satisfying. Next I ate my green concoction, which was really good. I must say a small amount of real butter does add a lot of flavor. And I did two things right - I paused in the middle. And I didn’t eat everything! I had 4 litchis for dessert & a cup of tea.

I was proud of myself for taking the time to cook, for using up the old vegetable, for the fact that it was my only leftover vegetable in the first place, for pausing, for making the goat cheese sandwiches which were wonderful and fast but felt so luxurious. For stopping eating before it was all gone.

Dinner w the Skinnies : At a traditional French restaurant with traditional French fare.

The first sign the Skinnies are not like us : they didn’t touch their bread. Now, I know that Mr Skinny apparently worries about carbs, but for goodness sake, we are in Paris, and the bread here is usually divine. But no, no bread for them.

The Skinnies both ordered soups for their appetizer (as did I) but Mrs Skinny ate very very little of hers. She had ordered a cream of mushroom thing that was served with this bowl of whipped cream on the side, which she didn’t touch. Later she found out that the foie gras was in the whipped cream bowl, not the soup itself, so she really missed out on the gourmet touch on her soup. I ate about the same amount of my soup as Mr Skinny, it was a big bowl & I knew we had more food coming…

The main dish : Mr Skinny was daring and ordered a steak tartare (raw!) and he ate a good portion of it, eating maybe 7 ounces of 10 that were served to him.  Steak tartare is almost always served with salad and fries, and Mr Skinny had a little of both, but not much of either.  I order steak (cooked, thank you!) fairly often in restaurants, almost always w a salad, and I ALWAYS polish off my salad.  Not just take a bite here and there.  And if I had fries - you can bet they’d get the same treatment (but I eat fries almost never).  It was interesting to see someone able to eat a few and it not be a big deal.

Mrs Skinny had a chicken dish in a rich sauce and served with veggies and she was the last one eating. She eats very very slowly. When she’s talking OR listening she does not eat. I don’t eat and talk at the same time, but while others are talking you can bet I’m chomping away. She ate maybe half of what was served to her, in tiny little bites and most of what she ate must have gone cold. I ordered sole, but don’t congratulate me, because I ordered it “sole meuniere” which means cooked in butter, so it was plenty rich. I did use my Dr Hope techniques, and when I paused I actually stopped eating, leaving about 25% on my plate! I also ate slower than usual because I was paying attention to the way my cousin pecked away at her dinner.

Dessert time : I had a hankering for chocolate but couldn’t talk my DH into it, he wanted the baked alaska (which I had never tried). He told me to go ahead and order what I wanted but I wasn’t very hungry and I didn’t want to order a dessert and only eat 3 bites, or worse, eat a lot of it because it was there in front of me (while Mrs Skinny would again eat slowly) or because “we’d paid for it”. So I ordered nothing but a spoon to share w DH. The Skinnies wanted something “light”. In fact, I’m pretty sure my cousin would have ordered a creme brulee if they’d had it on the menu, and her husband would have taken nothing, but they agreed on sorbet. Everyone ate a few bites of both the baked alaska and the sorbets. If you’ve never heard of baked alaska, it’s a dessert made of ice cream (in this case passionfruit sorbet) then covered on all sides by meringue and then “baked” or sometimes flambeed with a liquor. The egg white meringue protects the ice cream from the heat. Pretty, served on a platter that was well-decorated, but honestly it was not very good nor very interesting. The meringue was sickly-sweet and the sorbet was kind of blah. I only had a few bites and left most of the meringue part on my plate. The Skinnies didn’t finish their dessert either…