Following new diet trends was something of a family pastime in my house when I was growing up. That’s why I felt palpable relief when I found a new “diet” book whose premise didn’t rely on punishing workouts or exhaustive glycemic indexes but rather in exploring classic joie de vivre. Reading Mireille Guiliano’s “French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure” (Knopf, 263 pages, $22) was like smelling the aroma of freshly baked croissants wafting across an increasingly carb-controlled desert.

In the late 1960s, Ms. Guiliano, a native Frenchwoman, returned from a year as a high school exchange student in Michigan to her home in eastern France to discover she’d put on some weight. Soon after, she entered university in Paris, where her newfound appreciation of bagels and brownies – cultivated in America – was compounded by her daily route past myriad Parisian pastry shops, and matters grew worse. Thankfully, she had a family physician, nicknamed Dr. Miracle, to help her reclaim her French relation to food, the French way. Dr. Miracle explained to Ms. Guiliano that “il y a poids et poids” (there is weight and then there is weight) – there is a difference between what’s in fashion and the weight at which one feels good in one’s own skin. He instructed her to keep a record of everything that passed her lips for a three-week period to identify the “offenders.” Once identified, these offenders were to be gradually reduced, not stripped away completely, in order to regain balance. To build momentum in the beginning, he prescribed one weekend of leek soup and a little armchair psychology. Lots of water, a few simple self-deceptions, and taking the stairs whenever possible took care of the rest.

According to Ms. Guiliano, America’s “unsustainable extremism” and blanket prescriptions in its approach to weight are to blame for the fact that Americans eat 10%-30% more than is necessary to survive. Fifty percent of Americans are overweight, compared to 8% of French people.

Her program is deceptively simple, incorporating a large helping of common sense and anecdotal evidence from her own and her friends’ experiences. But for American readers, it may seem revolutionary. French women have always known how to enjoy a six-course meal with wine without binging on food, or punishing themselves endlessly afterwards.

Ms. Guiliano offers a wealth of gastronomic wisdom not only to defeat nos petits demons but to reawaken an individual, multi-sensory relationship to food as pleasure. She argues that Americans are starving for foods that satisfy their senses of smell, taste, and touch, not for McDonald’s. She rhapsodizes about freshly fallen hazelnuts and fields of myrtilles (wild blueberries) in Alsace; even the lowly prune becomes delectable.

Some of her suggestions, such as dining every night by candlelight, are a bit impractical. Others, like keeping a record of everything eaten in a three-week period, are familiar to anyone who’s tried Weight Watchers. But in the end, her philosophy, which she playfully calls French Zen, is that tout est un question d’equilibre (everything is a question of balance): Never be hungry, drink lots of water, buy fresh and in season, and eat smaller portions of a greater variety of foods.

Ms. Guiliano also provides a series of recipes for adapting to the “French Women” lifestyle, ranging from Dr. Miracle’s “Magical Leek Soup,” as you begin your transformation to eating like the French, to “Chocolate-Espresso Faux Souffles” for the more French-minded woman who can savor a few bites and leave the rest. All her recipes are refreshingly free of any trademarked ingredients, or sugar- or fat-free imposters.

Ms. Guiliano is confident that through slowly “recasting” and making minor adjustments American women can learn to think about what is good to eat instead of what we “can’t” have. Now an executive at Veuve Clicquot, Ms. Guiliano has tested her own methods at restaurants throughout New York, where she dines for business about 300 times a year.

“French Women” is not a book for anyone looking for a radical transformation, or a January 1 starting gun. The book’s true strength is to remind the dieting public that there are no quick fixes and that eating truly should be a source of real pleasure. From her own stories to her case studies, her goal is to urge readers to tailor their lives to suit their own needs, pleasures, and metabolisms so that, “like a classic Chanel suit, they should last you forever with minor alterations over the years.”

Halibut en Papillote
From “French Women Don’t Get Fat”

Serves 4

2 teaspoons olive oil
4 fillets of halibut, about 4 ounces each
1/2 cup Champagne (Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label Brut recommended; white wine or vermouth can be substituted)
8 sprigs fresh thyme
8 thin lemon slices
8 sprigs parsley
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
Salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Cut 8 pieces of parchment paper (or aluminum foil) into squares large enough to cover each fish fillet and leave a 2-inch border all around. Lightly brush 4 squares of the paper with olive oil. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Put each halibut fillet in the center of an oiled square and drizzle with Champagne. Add 2 sprigs of thyme, 2 lemon slices, 2 parsley sprigs, and 1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds to each piece of fish. Season with salt and pepper.

3. Place the remaining parchment squares on top of the fillets and fold up the edges to form packets. Simply double folding each of the four sides is enough to seal each packet. Put the papillotes on a baking sheet and bake in the preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

4. Serve by setting each papillote on a plate. Let your guests open their packets and spoon the juices over the fish.