When I arrived in France, my son assured me that eating the French way would help me lose weight. Since he had moved to France twenty years earlier and had lost that many pounds and more, he could make the claim with confidence. The loss would happen, he told me, despite the fact that the French diet was high in fat compared to my American diet—hence the paradox. To that end, I religiously adopted the eating habits of my family. I ate what everyone else was eating—wonderful bread, cheeses, salads, vegetables (including some I’d never heard of), fish, meat, poultry,