Stride Right

The Key to Walking is in Your Head, Not Your Feet

By Erin Jones

If you’re making the time to take a daily walk but haven’t yet felt the difference in your jeans, perhaps it’s the way you feel about your walk that’s contributing to the retention of those few stubborn pounds.

Take Mireille for example; it’s not always how much she walks, but the way she looks at walking.

You may remember the story from French Women Don’t Get Fat about Mireille’s embarrassing moment at the beach in Nantucket—when she was shocked to see herself in a bathing suit at the end of her first year abroad in the U.S. Her American ‘Mother’ quickly came to the rescue by sewing a summer shift to cover her weight gain. Years after that infamous summer in Nantucket, while Mireille’s American family visited her in France, they affectionately dubbed Mireille “the walker.” Aside from walking absolutely everywhere she went, Mireille, when asked “How much further?” would simply smile and say, “Just a little bit more.”

Indeed, that phrase says it all. Mireille doesn’t walk because it will help her lose weight. She walks because she truly enjoys the pace of her own feet. Instead of trudging along thinking “how much further?” She strolls on enjoying the scenery, the sights and the smells…not counting blocks or minutes until she reaches her destination. Just like Mireille’s suggestion that we need to change our relationship with food, we need to change our perspective on walking. The key to equilibrium is in our ability to extract pleasure from not only food, but also from all our daily rituals. Eat to live, not live to eat. And lose weight because you walk, don’t walk to lose weight. Therein lies the answer to eating, and moving, like a French woman.