Nearly 20 years after Guillano published French Women Don’t Get Fat, people are still conflating French women’s perceived thinness with fitness and health. It’s also worth noting that one in three French people smoked tobacco products as of 2020, a habit that is often associated with the French Girl archetype and one that is unfortunately frequently used as a weight-loss method-despite the fact that smoking is decidedly bad for your health. She’s also typically assumed to be healthy simply because she’s thin, even though we know that health and body size are by no means the same thing. Her thinness is to an extent a byproduct of these factors (as, again, socioeconomic circumstances such as income and education levels can influence a person’s weight), coupled with genetics. The French woman Guiliano writes about represents a specific type of person-one who is Parisian, wealthy, and usually white. Just because some French women are thin doesn’t mean they’re healthy. The effortlessness we associate with the French Girl archetype isn’t based in reality, yet we’re still being sold her perceived diet and lifestyle habits as the pinnacle of womanhood. Fat people are still called names and seen (and portrayed in media) as lazy or lacking willpower, while thin people are still praised and glamorized. This observation aligns with research showing a significant spike in eating disorder treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic: A 2022 study in the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that from March 2020 to November 2021, anorexia-related hospitalizations in France increased by 46% for girls aged 10 to 19 and by 7% for women aged 20 to 29.Īlthough Casse says that body acceptance is slowly gaining traction in France, she caveats that the culture of anti-fatness prevails. Céline Casse, the founder of StopTCA, a French therapy platform that connects people dealing with disordered eating habits to nutritionists and therapists, is painfully aware of this reality, citing the example of a 10-year-old girl she worked with who asked her “if it was normal to make herself vomit.” Casse tells SELF that, due in part to a culture that promotes thinness ahead of health, she’s seeing eating disorders begin increasingly early among middle and high school kids.
Plenty of them-as was the case for me-also develop problems with disordered eating as they try to live up to a harmful ideal. The truth is, lots of French women aren’t thin.
The idea that French women don’t get fat is, if not entirely made up, at least woefully distorted. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way about the warped messages I was sold about women’s bodies, including the ridiculous and deeply harmful idea that we should all try to look like this mythical French girl.
Though I still have days when my own anti-fat bias rears its ugly head, I consider myself recovered from disordered eating now, close to 11 years after I first left my home country.
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