Five words I never thought I’d string together: fitness boot camp, gourmet food. Two more words: it works. Reader, I’ve just returned from five days at Camp Biche, a luxurious retreat in the medieval village of Lauzerte in southwest France that specialises in fitness, weight loss and good food and so now I know: the combination is fabulous. And by good food I don’t mean ‘delicious’ bean sprouts, carrot juice and vegetable bouillon, but foie gras and cassoulet, lamb, pork, and walnuts, local cheeses and saucisson, sourdough breads and homemade fruit tarts — all specialities of the Lot, the beautiful, fertile and still untrampled region of France, justly proud of its own gastronomic culture, where Camp Biche is situated. And though Bordeaux, like Toulouse and certainly Paris, seems a world away from the fiercely independent farms and fairy-tale hilltop villages of the region, it isn’t. Good red wine flows freely at Camp Biche.
‘I want to teach people that food is not the enemy,’ says Libby Pratt, the eminently sensible and enterprising woman who started Camp Biche a little over a year ago, as she shows me to my seat for a three-course lunch of soup, a spinach and walnut salad with Roquefort dressing, and fresh raspberries with honey and vanilla frozen yoghurt (and lunch is a much more modest affair than dinner).
Pratt is right of course, but it’s one thing to understand what she says in your head, quite another to spread the word to the rest of your body. For many women, eating is an emotional activity, fraught with guilt and anxiety – not all the time, but often. Unless, that is, you are French. French women eat when they are hungry, and stop when they are full. Food – all kinds of food – is enjoyed, rather than demonised, denied, fetishised, or longed for, and for this simple reason and because they eat in moderation (easy when there is no danger or anxiety attached), French women are rarely overweight, even though their diet includes, shock horror, regular doses of cheese and red meat, bread and cream and the odd slice of tarte aux pommes.
Pratt is an American who has led a varied life. She is a native of Montana but met her husband Craig Resnick while working as a trader on the San Francisco stock exchange. The couple were supposed to honeymoon in France, but Resnick couldn’t manage the time away from the stocks and so Pratt, ever practical, took off to France without him. She quickly fell in love – not only with France but with the French way of life. And it didn’t take her long to persuade Resnick that they too should live their lives surrounded by livestock, eating off the land, walking long distances, not watching TV, and becoming close to their neighbours, and by 2001, after a few years of summering in France, they had bought a walnut farm in the Lot and, four years later, they left their American lives behind completely. The idea for Camp Biche followed soon after.
An American woman promoting a French approach to food? In fact, this is the Camp Biche masterstroke. It works brilliantly. I know plenty of French women, and I envy and admire both their insouciant eating habits and fastidious grooming routines. I’ve read books about their wonderful little ways and devilish tricks; books full of detailed instructions on how to emulate them. Can I do it, any of it? Can I tosh. I’m a scruffy English person. I’m defeated at the first shrug. I might as well take notes from a Martian. But being spoon-fed Frenchness by a no-nonsense American woman who understands neurosis around food, though doesn’t hold much truck with it? That, it turns out, I can do.
