AsiaLIFE

The trouble with being a restaurant reviewer and sometime critic is that while you’re searching for that apposite, telling phrase your stomach is creeping over your beltline. And you thought it was only women who watched their weight. Wrong.

Exercise and the expelling of nervous energy help control your weight as you approach middle age. Then the “spread” associated with your forties begins to overtake your good intentions. Add to that the unyielding heat and humidity of a typical Cambodian day. Raising a glass of amber nectar to your lips cools you down, quenches your thirst and gives your scales a workout as the kilograms pour on.

Spin that analogy forward and put yourself in the steel-capped boots of top chefs. They’re snacking their way through most lunch and dinner services just to be sure their diners get “that taste”. In a typical day they probably eat more than their average diner and most of the time they’re moving around a small area in the heat and intensity of a kitchen at full stretch.Weight, diet, too much sweat and not enough muscle-burning exercise are their bugbears.

It’s a syndrome Alain Darc of Topaz Restaurant had to face when Arnaud, his son and partner in the Thalias Group, persuaded him to join him in the weight-loss Dukan Diet. It was especially important for “Papa” Darc, because his lower legs and ankles were puffy, discoloured, bruised and looked like the result of bad circulation, phlebitis or an excessive build-up of fluid.

Losing weight, he was told, was the answer and the Dukan Diet was the way forward. Devised and written in a series of books by Dr Pierre Dukan, a French medical doctor and nutritionist, people in 20 countries now read his advice in 10 languages and swear by, not at, his dieting solution to halting the onset of middle-aged midriff spread.

And it’s not just a man thing. Its popularity stateside was in no small part due to the sight of Catherine Middleton when she joined Prince William at the altar in Westminster Abbey last April. She looked a lot thinner than she had in previous months and her weight loss sparked rumours that she was either ill or on a diet. Then her mother, Carole, revealed that she had been on the Dukan Diet to shed prewedding pounds. The books’ US publishers couldn’t print copies fast enough.

Although it has been criticised as a version of the Atkins diet and a bit of a fad, it works. Even top chefs around the world have signed up to its strictures and Gael Boulet, who works alongside superchef Alain Ducasse, had the temerity to improve its recipes and send them to the good doctor.

With its mantra of full and satisfied not fat and satiated, Dukan is based around two main food groups: those rich in animal proteins and vegetables. The aspiration offered by the regimen’s weight loss came true for Arnaud, and the kilograms fell off his father, lightening the load on his feet and legs. It was the new lease on life he had hoped for.

“It was important for me, because I have to stand all day and my ankles and legs hurt a lot,” Papa says. “When man first walked the Earth we were hunter-gatherers, that’s what we were designed for. As we evolved, so our eating habits changed, and we became more sedentary, reared our food and grew crops. Our food now is designed far more to be a source of pleasure than as a way of getting nutrition.

“My eating habits before I started the diet were basically about eating on the run, so to speak, or eating at unsocial times. Following the Dukan Diet meant I ate regularly and consumed a healthy collection of animal proteins and vegetables.

“Some of the recipes were tasty, but many of them were not so appealing. But there’s no gain without perhaps some pain, so to speak. That, though, wasn’t the point. Weight loss and a healthy diet were very important and in two months I have lost many unwanted kilograms.”

Although not exactly a shadow of his former large, round and ebullient self, Papa has a wry smile for the time he has had to take rather than give orders. He admits to feeling better and less weighed down and said his newfound and more streamlined body means he can take on challenges rather than back away from them.

As Dukan says in one of his several books: “My intention is not to argue that we return to the caveman’s frugal diet, but rather to drive my point home that dieting by getting back to eating foods that we originally ate is no hardship.”

Divided into bite-size chunks of advice and healthy eating options, including emotive phrases such as “attack” and “cruise phases”, his dietary recipe book is divided into pure protein recipes and those with protein and vegetables. Many of them may not be to everyone’s taste, as Papa was quick to explain, grimacing at the thought of some of them. But if nothing else, its strictures of timetable and diet kept him off snacking and into healthy eating with time for digestion.