NOTE: This technique is an example of the techniques that make up Chic & Slim TECHNIQUES by Anne Barone. This particular technique is NOT one of the 10 techniques included in the book, but rather a preview technique to acquaint you with the format of the Techniques book.

Breakfast sets the tone for eating for the entire day.

Your breakfast plays a crucial role in your efforts to be chic and slim. How much food you really need in the first hours after rising depends on a number of factors including your own physiology, what you will eat for lunch, how much and at what time you ate your evening meal the night before, and your activity level.

You can probably become slim eating some of the more nutritious breakfast cereals -- especially if you eat them without adding any sugar to the milk. (In which case the stuff will taste really blah.) But breakfast cereal was what I ate when I was a fatty. Just seeing a bowl of the stuff is a depressing reminder of all those years I was fat. I don't even want to watch other people eat the stuff, much less taste it.

Anyway, how can you feel sophisticated and chic if you have started out your day with a bowl of soggy, nutrition-robbed, tasteless, extruded carbohydrate flakes? What about cooked cereal? True, cooked cereals made from whole, natural grains offer better taste and good nutrition. But cooked cereal is pretty low on the sophistication scale. Unless your idea of sophistication is a peasant slurping up a bowl of gruel.

I can't imagine a chic French woman eating a dish of oatmeal or buckwheat groats, then putting on a sexy skirt and three-inch heels and tripping off down the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Non! Non! Non!

As I said in the introduction to this technique, how much food you need for breakfast depends on a number of factors. The years when I was eating meals consisting of French cuisine served in several courses somewhat late in the evening, I found my fruit (usually papaya or grapefruit) eaten with a three-inch chunk of baguette with a bit of butter and jam and coffee sufficient. Other times and places in my life, I have found different versions of breakfast worked for me. In recent years, I find that a more substantial whole grain bread that includes ground flax seeds sustains me better through the morning than simply a chuck of baguette made from unbleached white flour.

My usual breakfast is a a wedge of the Barone Breakfast Bread, a recipe I developed using for the most part whole grains. My breakfast beverage is usually hot tea instead of coffee. I often add about a tablespoon of whole milk to my cup of tea if I am drinking an Assam, a Ceylon, or an English or Irish breakfast tea. I skip the milk in the tea if I am spreading a white cheese in place of butter on my bread. Or if my tea is one that is simply so good that I do not want to minimize its wonderful taste in any way, I would also skip the milk. French breakfast tea is usually a Ceylon. If I drink SpecialTeas.com's wonderful Kenilworth Estate Ceylon or Lover's Leap from the Dimbulla Estate for breakfast, then I do not add milk.

I understand from people who have recently lived and visited in France that the French are beginning to eat breakfast cereals. Why? Why would the French want to eat that dry, tasteless stuff when, on every street in town, they can buy these wonderful freshly baked breads? Why, when they have that wonderful Normandy butter and those delicious all fruit jams, would they want to eat breakfast cereal? Baffling. And discouraging. Is this what globalization produces?

One misconception Americans have about French breakfasts is that the French eat croissants and brioche for breakfast. In my experience, croissants and brioche were considered pastry and eaten on special occasions and for treats at times when one would eat dessert. True, in French hotels they often serve croissants to Americans since that is what Americans seem to expect served for a French breakfast. But I did not see those chic, very slim French women eating croissants and brioche for breakfast. Sorry.

When I think of a French breakfast, I think of breakfast at a sidewalk cafe on a Parisian summer morning. The night rain has washed the streets and buildings. In their planters, red geraniums sit rain-refreshed and brilliant in the crystal morning light. It is early. Waiters, their white aprons spotless and stiff are setting out chairs and little tables on the sidewalk. When the waiter brings the little metal pot of coffee and the pitcher of milk, the rich, fragrant steam swirls up as he approaches. Along with the coffee aroma, you can smell the yeasty baguette arrived so recently from the morning baking at the nearby boulangerie. The creamy butter and the jewel-colored berry jam glisten in their little dishes. You pour coffee and milk into the heavy white ceramic cup, lift it to your lips, and carefully sip. You taste Paris.

In Roughing It On The Rue de la Paix, the American in Paris Dorothy Adelson describes a typical French breakfast served by her chic French friend Simone. "Simone adored coffee, and there was coffee, with hot boiled milk, French bread and butter and cherry jam. We drank our coffee out of big round bowls without handles." And the chic Simone breakfasts dressed in a silk wrap robe with a scarf twisted "carelessly and with magnificent rightness around her neck." Need I tell you that, of course, Simone is slim as well as chic.

So do all those slim, chic French women dutifully eat their tartine (that's what the French call the chunk of baguette spread with butter and jam) and drink their coffee laced with milk for breakfast? Actually not. To be perfectly truthful, a lot of slim French women, as a lot of slim women in other countries, do not eat breakfast. Though a lot of them do charge up for the morning on a cup of that strong French coffee.

American nutritionists frown on coffee-only breakfasts. American nutritionists's breakfasts seem to involve a bowl of whole grains of some sort with soy or rice milk, or a protein with vegetables. I can honestly say I have never seen a French woman eat any sort of vegetable for breakfast. American nutritionists usually frown on cups of strongly caffeinated coffee. They want your beverage caffeine-free, preferably herbal.

When I was a fatty following various of the unsuccessful diets that I tried, the advice was invariably to eat a good breakfast. To someone with a huge appetite like mine, I always interpreted a good breakfast as a lot of food. I could pack in juice, cereal, toast with jam and margarine, bacon , eggs, and maybe a glass of milk and a cinnamon roll with pecans just to finish things off. (Yikes! Any wonder I outweighed most of the high school football team? )

Yet, I observed that when I ate a more reasonably sized breakfast, just a hard-boiled egg, two strips of bacon, a slice of toast with a tiny bit of margarine and jam, I generally had more success in sticking to reasonable amounts of healthy food for the other meals of the day. I was not so likely to crave high-calorie snacks. I was never certain if this was psychological or physical. Some recent research results I have read suggests that it was likely physical, especially considering the effect of simple carbohydrates on insulin levels. But I am also sure there was a psychological factor too.

In Dr. Robert Ziff's Secrets of the French Diet, his more recent observations of the French at breakfast agree with those of mine made some decades ago. He observes that many French do not eat breakfast or have only coffee. But he recommends having a light breakfast if you are trying to lose weight. (Remember that the French are not trying to shed ten or twenty pounds. They have never allowed themselves to become overweight.) Dr. Ziff cautions that there are dangers in eating too much for breakfast because a large breakfast expands the stomach, and for many people, this will cause them to be hungrier at lunch than if they did not eat at all. He advises: "Eat just enough at breakfast so that you are full -- not overfull -- and when lunchtime comes, you will have no trouble deciding you are full before you overeat." Moderation. Moderation.

Dr. Ziff, an American doctor with culinary training in French cuisine who has spent much time in France (a great deal of that time spent eating French cuisine apparently), recommends several versions of French breakfast for the weight-conscious American. Breakfast No. 1 is a section of French baguette with jam, a small glass of juice or a small piece of fruit and cafe au lait made with 1% milk. His Breakfast No. 3 is the bread and cafe au lait with fruit and cheese in place of the jam and juice. His Breakfast No. 2 does, I regret to say, include breakfast cereal.

To me anything less than whole milk tastes terrible in coffee or tea. And the French women I knew always preferred whole milk or real cream. Like them, I prefer the fatted version of milk: whole milk for tea and whole milk, half and half, or most especially real cream for coffee. As for butter on the bread, I always thought that the teeny bit of butter that chic French women took on the point of their knife and spread and spread on their bread hardly counted. Dr. Ziff also says that the French eat fresh fruit and yogurt in the morning. And his observation of the eating of croissants and brioche is, like mine, that they are holiday foods, not ones eaten at an everyday breakfast.

In his book Low Fat Lies, High Fat Frauds, author Dr. Kevin Vigilante in writing about the "the healthiest diet in the world," the Mediterranean diet, says that many Mediterraneans eat a light Continental breakfast. They may have fruit, yogurt, or fiber-rich bread with fruit spread. Occasionally they will eat eggs. Fiber-rich bread would be those with whole grains for all or part of the flour. And let us remember this Mediterranean diet is eaten in southern France, that region in which French woman Jeanne Calment achieved her 122 years -- despite smoking until 115.

When Dr. Vigilante writes "fruit spreads," he is indicating the French jams made with fruit and fruit juice with no sugar added. In my favorite Provence cookbook, A Taste of Provence by Leslie Forbes, the author whose charming illustrations accompany this travel/cookbook, writes:

The men start work early on summer mornings, at about five or six, but are back in three hours to eat a la fourchette eggs and cheese, or gratins left over from last night's supper. The women make do with large bowls of cafe au lait in which to dip bread smeared with homemade jam, usually fig or watermelon.