Introduction x Trouble is, this focus on what to eat is largely irrelevant; I don’ t think I have met an overweight person who did not know what they should eat and what they shouldn’ t eat! Getting people excited – and motivated – about a new diet is easy; people want to believe in a new quick and easy solution, but this motivation only works for the short term. The enticement of a quick and easy solution is the real life version of the story of the drunk looking under the streetlight for his house keys. As the story goes, a man out for a late night stroll comes across the hapless fellow and helps him search. After spending some time helping the drunk without any sign of the keys, he ventured the question‘ Are you sure you dropped them around here?’‘ Oh no’, replied the drunk,‘ I dropped them over there in the shadows, but it’ s too dark to find them there.’ This book is all about venturing over into the dark to deal with the rather complicated habit of over-eating, while respecting our deep love of food. While the solution is not quick, it is very much about making it easier. What the research shows, over and over again, is that the enjoyment of food wins out every time if the weight-loss program is too restrictive. Rather than being about going on‘ a diet’, this book is all about developing‘ a new eating lifestyle’ for the rest of your life. The best way to do this is to involve the others with whom you share your refrigerator so that you create a sub-culture that makes it easier for everyone in it to eat in way that keeps everyone slim. This is the French way, which we will repeatedly return to throughout this book. Perhaps our greatest responsibility, however, is to the next generation. Rates of obesity in children have doubled. Those of us who are parents must make it easier for our children to manage their weight by making healthy eating an automatic lifestyle for them from a young age. In this way – by the time they are making their own food choices, healthy eating will be a deeply entrenched habit. GBW