French Women Don't Get Fat: the secret of eating for pleasure Mireille Guiliano Chatto & Windus, 292pp, £12 ISBN 0701178051

''You look like a sack of potatoes." Thus greeted by her father on her return to France after a stint as an exchange student in North America, Mireille Guiliano began to hate herself for the ten kilos she had gained in the pizza-wolfing New World. One authoritarian man condemned her; another, whom she calls Dr Miracle, rescued her. This book is the result of what sounds like a career of sin, repentance and conversion. When men are awarded the roles of diagnostician, saviour and chef, it is women who take responsibility for chivvying each other into correct behaviour in the kitchen and at table. Guiliano duly provides a list of tips for her sisters who are struggling with their fatness. The bishop and the chaplain may write the rules for the nuns, but the abbess is free to tweak them as she sees fit.

You can tell that I approached this guide to healthy eating with some suspicion. Any mention of dieting - that is to say, a restraint imposed by others - and I reach for my second helping. Having eventually got over this childish need to rebel and misbehave, I found much of Guiliano's advice practical and sane. First, however, let's admit that fat Frenchwomen do exist in large numbers, but live, for the most part, in the countryside. Poor Frenchwomen in the city also tend to be fat. Guiliano is, as she admits, addressing the urban middle-class woman in the developed world, who has to look good to succeed in her career and retain her husband's affections. So far, so bourgeois.

Dr Miracle's advice to the young Mireille was simply to abandon puritanical American habits of starving and bingeing. Out went grazing on junk food, snacking on pastries, slimming, skipping meals and frantically working out at the gym. In came relearning the pleasure-seeking attitudes of Frenchwomen who are interested in food, rather than seeing it as an enemy. If this book has no respect for diets as such, nor does it waste much time on in-depth psychology. Dr Miracle is of the cognitive therapy rather than the psychoana-lytical school. Yes, you may be overeating because of personal problems - mother-daughter fallout, alienation from capitalist notions of femininity, or whatever - but learn to think, gently retrain your attitudes and, above all, cook fresh food, and you can simultaneously learn to eat well, look good and be happy.

The book does offer a programme. Kick-start your new life by spending a weekend eating and drinking only leek soup made with water. Cheered by the loss of a kilo or so, you will be ready to "embrace pleasure and happiness as your goals. Sounds paradoxical? At least half our bad eating and drinking habits are careless; they grow out of inattention to our true needs and delights." So you spend the next three months writing down everything you eat, checking out your fads and fancies, what and why you overeat, learn to cut back a little, eat a little less, learn to recognise when you are full, learn that you do not have to eat every chip on the plate. Finally, having lost a lot of weight during this process, you are ready to embrace your new attitude to food, and it will last a lifetime.

This is the classic way preached, yes, by my own French mother: moderation in all things. Or, as my English grandmother put it, a little bit of what you fancy does you good. So real, dark chocolate, being delicious, should not be forbidden; nor should bread. Both, not eaten to excess, are good for you. Similarly, a glass of wine is an ordinary accompaniment to a meal. Guiliano recommends champagne to her female readers, partly because she considers champagne as quintessentially feminine and partly, I think, because she works for the makers of Veuve Clicquot.

Aimed initially at American readers, the book is obliged to explain European culture at some length. It is anecdotal, repetitive (the recipe for Maman's famous vegetable soup is given twice), sometimes oddly phrased, and overlong. Unlike its author, it is padded out. Inside every fat book, perhaps, is a slim thesis longing to reveal itself.

Michele Roberts's new novel, Reader, I Married Him, is published by Little, Brown

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