I’m not sure why, but this has always been a topic of interest for me. Never really had serious body image issues, I think it’s just a fascination with their culture…

French people eat until they’re full, Americans eat until the food’s gone
Furthermore, we have found that the heavier a person is — French or American — the more they rely on external cues to tell them to stop eating and the less they rely on whether they felt full,” said senior author Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management, now on leave to serve as executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion until January 2009.

Via Boing Boing

Along the same lines, close friend of mine also recommended the above book to me French Women Don’t Get Fat.

…you’ll find simple tricks that boil down to eating carefully prepared seasonal food, exercising more and refusing to think of food as something that inspires guilt. It’s both a practical message and far easier said than done in today’s ‘no pain, no gain’ culture.