I think, originally, it’s one of you who told me about Mademoiselle Caroline and her blog. Intrigued by the homonymy, I confess, I had a look. And I loved it, her drawings, her humor, the way she tells her life of a city-dweller now expatriate in the mountains, her family and romantic anecdotes, etc. And then one day, Mademoiselle Caroline sent me an email to suggest sending me her comic book entitled « Je commence lundi, le régime anti-régime »[1].
Inevitably, I agreed. And I didn’t regret it, as this story, hers, is universal (in any case it’s mine too and it’s a good start for universality). Caroline is 29 years old too (or almost), she started to find herself fat from a very young age even though she wasn’t, she went on so many totally dumb diets, felt like killing someone after three days of protein diet with great many poo flavored pancakes or vomit and chalk omelets. Like me, she went through fascists nutritionists, like me she has lost many friends by always asking them if salad sauce will come “on the side” before accepting their invite.
And then one day, Caroline met Amandine, her own Zermati. That’s when our stories differ slightly because this dietician’s method, if it has points of agreement with Zermati’s – regulation, eating when you’re hungry, no taboo food -, is not exactly the same – on a few points I find precepts that don’t suit me, like “eating two or three light stuff before a feast, in order not to get there with the munchies = exactly the opposite of what I’ve now learnt to do” or else “never skip a meal”. But as no one holds THE truth, I’ll be careful not to express reservations, clearly with Caroline, in any case, it worked. Most of all, the book is not limited to this, needless to say, what’s delightful in these slices of life are all these anecdotes that any diets regular knows: the mega slim girl who, when she learns you’re on a diet since two months (and you’ve indeed shed 7 kilos), asks you if “it works” (urge to bite). The other girl, also a rake since her birth, who lectures you on life and undermines at the same time the little faith you have in the future: “oh but Caro, it’s all fun and games to slim down, but you know what they say, the hardest part is not to gain again” (in other words, you’ll never make it, you fat cow). Without mentioning the ones who try by all means to make you eat a piece of their chocolate cake while you are in mindfulness from the beginning of the meal not to glance at it. Or, of course, those 234 grams you’ve put on that morning, which are going to wear you down for the day, turn you in an irascible shrew and make you just gobble down the chocolate cake, because “there’s nothing left to lose, right”.
You get me, it spoke to me, made me laugh and also stirred me, because damn, it’s crazy to waste your life that much.
I can only advise you to get it, even to offer it to any person who one day, for the first time, has convinced you that you were too fat.
Personally it was an uncle of mine, whom I loved, and who found smart to repeat – as joke of course – that I looked like an old obese cousin of whom the whole family was making fun. He had even saddled me with her name. I was six or seven. I’m not saying he has been at the root of all the rest, but the fact that thirty years later (I’m lost in my calculations with these questions of age) I remember so precisely and that it still brings tears to my eyes make me think it hasn’t been totally pain-free…
