Anyone interested in my recurring topic of nutrition might well guess that I approached my vacation in France (now over - I'm in New York girding for law firm life) with a little trepidation about my weight. I had completely failed to build in any leeway by losing a few extra pounds while still in my clerkship, and I still meant to eat rather a lot in Paris. Anyway, I tipped the scales at 169 on September 4, when I left for Iceland. I didn't fear a return to the days of 250 pound Raffi, but even 180 would have been a (completely possible, for me) disaster.

And I did eat. The usual day consisted of my morning croissant (I ate 22 different pain au chocolats over the trip), followed by a formule dejeuner at lunch (an Extra value meal, boulanger style), including a half baguette sandwich (usually my favorite, jambon, beurres, cornichon (ham, butter, pickles), a cake (usually an eclair, coffee or chocolate), and a diet soda. At 3 or 4 in the afternoon I downed another cake, this time usually a much richer "opera" (chocolate and coffee cream layered under a topping of crackly chocolate, with spirit soaked layers of thin almond biscuit), "etoile" (a round chocolate mousse cake with a few ultra thin genoise layers), "pave chocolat" (like the opera, but only chocolate, and chocolate shavings on top instead of a crispy chocolate layer), "meringue aux chocolat noir et pistaches" (a half moon shaped cake, much like the etoile but with a layer of pistachio greenily livening up the center), or one of the various tarts (tartelette citron [lemon], au framboise [raspberry], au chocolate, au fruits mixte, au fraise [strawberry]). Some days I substituted this second cake with a few of the smaller cookie like offerings - "financiers" (almond cookies), "cannelles" (small chimney shaped cakes), various sables (cookies), and even the odd brownie or two (pronounced, funnily, broonie, but made in the french way with bitter dark chocolate, not funny at all but delicious). At night I ate with my family in Paris, and after dinner added the cheese of the day - though to be honest, this ended up being the local brie de meaux more often than not. Of course, the cheese involved yet another baguette ( baguette aux cereales [multigrain baguette], baguette vrillee au seigle [a twisted white flour baguette rolled in rye], etc). This excludes all the multiple course meals for lunch at the Ritz, my visit to Le Relais Louis XIII, several enormous meals in Holland, a morning of stuffing myself while observing at a bakery, and the occasional day with a third cake (Am I really supposed to resist the call of a second eclair from the great Michel Tesson, on Avenue Mozart? The answer is no.)

I stepped on the scales on the 27th. 169.4, it said! That result has held for a couple of days now, so I'm going to assume it's stable, and that I can brag. Or instruct. Or whatever this is. So how did the food intake above result in such a little gain, for someone with one of the worst metabolisms on the face of the planet? Some advice follows:

1. Laissez! Or, be the creator of externalities - The experienced french food critic, Gilles Pudlowski, has this advice in his terrific book "Comment Etre Critique Gastronomique Et Garder La ligne" ("How to be a Food critique and stay healthy", I think, though I haven't pulled out my french idiomatic dictionary yet) - "Mais, je vous le demande, comment maigrir dans tout ca? Eh bien, une seule solution : en laissir. Et son corollaire: ne jamais se resservir". Again, roughly, "how to lose weight amid [all this food?] Learn to leave some on your plate. And never go for seconds." I did taste all those things I listed above, but I didn't always finish them, and especially not the cakes. Instead, they got either binned, or (less ideally) pawned off on my uncles. My weight stability was bought with a few extra calories for them, I fear, but it worked. The same goes for my late night cheeses. Yes, it was super full fat, raw milk brie, redolent with the flavor of cow, and pasture, and of the times soon when I'd be deprived of it back home again. But it was only 30 grams (an ounce) of regret, not 200.

2. The Urban Hike - I didn't get as much running in as I hoped (though some), but I subbed in my patented urban hikes. That is, walks of such length and speed that they're not really walks anymore. The most extreme was a 9 km saunter after my delicious but dangerous meal at Le Relais Louis XIII, but there were other long walks as well, their length directly proportional to how ludicrously I had blown through a normal daily allowance of food (I'm looking at you, oh day of four cakes, a box of cannelles, and 250 grams of rilletes d'oie [pulled goose meat preserved in goose fat]. And if you need things from two different stores right next to each other, why not buy the first, walk all the way back to where you started, and go back for the second? You might look nuts, but it's an extra 100 kcals!

3. Light, late at night! - everyone says that a calorie is a calorie. But I'm convinced those consumed late are worse than those you've got the whole day to burn. So I shoved as much as possible of my eating towards the morning and afternoon as I could, and treated the evening meal as a snack to take the edge off my appetite until the next morning's croissant.