Breakfast like a princess … 40 aspects of their culture that I will share with you appear to have any downside – so we can afford to be over-inclusive. The first observation that we will make about the French is that they love fresh ingredients and home cooked meals. Three-quarters of French people eat at home or eat a meal that they prepared at home. Compare that to the fast food cultures of most western countries. What’ s important about home cooked meals is that they are usually cooked with raw ingredients. In contrast, fast foods contain highly processed ingredients with the main casualty of processing being fibre. I will come back to this later. The second observation about the French is that lunch is the main meal of the day. Remember the energy mismatch that we discussed in Chapter 4 – where we eat our largest meal at the end of the day as we wind down to go to sleep? Here the French have a big advantage over us in that their culture not only supports this but requires it. So embedded in their culture is this practice that some employers subsidize lunch for employees, complete with wine, through restaurant vouchers! Offices close down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day as people are given time to both prepare and enjoy their meal. Now of course my clients point out that, strangely enough, their employer does not shut down for a couple of hours during the day – let alone offer vouchers to a nearby licensed restaurant! All true. But weekends and holidays are the place to start. And these are good places to start because these are often times that we over-indulge. Whenever possible, my wife and I will plan social get-togethers with friends or family for lunch on Saturday or Sunday. Even if we’ re not catching up with others, lunch will be the most elaborate meal of the day. As we tend to eat late, we will often finish lunch around 3.30 p. m., so come tea time we’ re not at all hungry. Having a light meal is then dead easy for us and requires no self-discipline at all. Often we will have something simple like soup or fresh corn on the cob with butter, pepper and salt.