Another Lady Helpfully Explains Why French Women Don't Get Fat

By now many American have had a chance to try and fail the Dukan Diet, which means we’re ready for a new French-endorsed eating regimen. Enter “Le Forking” the absurd new fad diet that bans the use of spoons, knives, and hands during dinner.

News of this diet comes to us via the Daily Mail, our go-to source for patently ridiculous heath tips. Samantha Brick, who lives in France, writes:

I am married to a Frenchman, who watches my weight as closely as I do. We are perfectly aware to the nearest pound what we each weigh — and how much weight we need to lose.

Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy! According to Brick, the idea of the naturally-thin French woman is a myth. The French aren’t generally slimmer than Americans because eat smaller portions of higher quality foods and have limited access to IHOP. She claims that everyone in France closely watches their weight and “they drastically restrict their calorie intake by following a strict diet at least once each season.”

Or at least, that’s what she’s surmised from her in-laws horrifying behavior. When Brick’s sister-in-law Veronique emails her an unflattering picture snapped while she was asleep on lounge chair with the message “I thought you should see this,” she decides she needs to lose weight. (According to Emily Post, the correct response in this situation is to send an email that reads “I thought you should see this,” along with a photo of you flipping the bird.)

Her diet of choice, Le Forking, involves eating a normal-sized breakfast and lunch, and then only eating food that fit on a fork for dinner. The plan was invented by Ivan Gavriloff, who (surprise, surprise) isn’t a nutritionist. Brick writes:

A team of diet experts has checked that his theory really works. The principle idea is that certain food types just won’t make it on to any of those fork prongs. In particular, those containing fat or sugar.

According to Gavriloff, it’s the food we need to use a knife to eat that causes us to pile on the pounds: cheese, meat and sausages (not to mention the sauces and other garnishes that accompany them). Consequently, all animal protein is off limits for the evening meal.

As you’ve probably already worked out, cheese, meat, and sausages can all be eaten with a fork. You can also convey other banned foods like pizza, hamburgers, nuts, and bread to your mouth using the utensil. (If confronted with a lobster bisque, we’d probably figure out a way to make that work too.)

Since the fork concept doesn’t actually make any sense, dieters basically need to memorize an arbitrary list of acceptable foods. These include “pasta, pulses, cereals, fish and most types of vegetable.” Healthy foods like avocados, hummus, nuts, and almonds are off limits. And under the more hardcore version, you can’t eat anything that’s been prepared with a knife and a spoon. Under that plan your entree must consist of a whole tomato sitting on a bed of hand-shredded lettuce. Actually, it’s pretty hard to eat a tomato with just a fork, so make that just a bed of lettuce.

Brick claims that after following the diet for three weeks, “my husband commented that my tummy was less podgy and my double chin had diminished.” (How sweet.) Though she insists it’s all the rage in France, we’re still not entirely convinced that it’s even real. The French word for the utensil isn’t “fork,” and concocting an idiotic fake fad diet for the purposes of chuckling at English speakers seems like something the French might do.

Don’t Eat Anything That Won’t Fit On A Fork: It’s The Daftest Diet Ever, But It Actually Works! [Daily Mail]