An inside guide to healthy living in Paris
Pass by the patisseries and discover some of the city’s best options for keeping in shape
To stay healthy in Paris you need merely yield to the right temptations — choosing to walk or cycle in a city famously easy on the eye — while resisting the wrong ones.
These bad temptations include gorging on “nuns” (religieuses — the pastry kind) and drinking red wine to excess while discussing existentialism and complaining about your fellow Parisians, specifically their tendency to complain.
Step by step to a better life
The strikes and protests that have crippled Paris transport in recent weeks have exposed to visitors one of the city’s best-kept secrets: the French capital is small — small enough to walk across.
Smug residents of the 20 arrondissements within Paris’s ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique, already knew this, and many of us are accustomed to walking briskly or cycling across Paris to work or appointments. We do so not just because it’s healthy but because it’s often quicker and more comfortable, even in times of industrial harmony.
The strikes on buses, Métro lines and trains over president Emmanuel Macron’s planned pension reforms have made a necessity of virtue. The streets have been crammed with pedestrians, inhabitual cyclists, scooter-riders and, unfortunately, cars.
Still, I was surprised by the manageable walk times shown on a map published by Le Parisien in the depths of the public sector strikes. Almost everywhere you would want to go for business or pleasure, except the Palace of Versailles and the business district of La Défense — both of them beyond the périph — are within an hour’s walk of Châtelet, a transit hub in the centre of the city. From the Gare du Nord to the centre is just 30 minutes, and it is only another 35 to the Gare Montparnasse in the south.
There’s a catch, though: your journey on foot will inevitably take you past mouthwatering displays of food and drink in shop windows, especially the chocolateries and patisseries, so look away and keep walking.
Vive la bouffe . . .
Now, about that food and drink. Anyone who frequented Paris in the 1980s or the 1990s will be shocked at how much habits have changed — for the better if you are worried about your liver or your waistline, for the worse if you are an Epicurean.
It’s rare nowadays for politicians or chief executives to indulge in the sort of long, languid lunches I recall having with civil servants and bankers when I was a Reuters trainee in the Mitterrand era.
Even when such repasts do happen in the 21st century, the helpings will be mercifully small in a very un-American way, with the focus on taste and quality rather than quantity.
The French are not averse to fast food. British sandwich chain Pret A Manger has opened a huge shop around the corner from the FT office in the 8th arrondissement and France has long been one of the biggest markets for McDonald’s.
Chefs and winemakers, however, are increasingly obsessed with organic farming, while restaurants like to source ingredients from a known terroir, preferably French and in the home region of the owner.
France has not escaped the global obesity epidemic, but the self-discipline of Parisians and the focus on quality produce mean visitors still remark on the phenomenon Mireille Guiliano addressed 16 years ago, when she wrote French Women Don’t Get Fat.
. . . et le vin!
The same rule of quality over quantity applies to wine. It is unusual for anyone to have more than one glass of wine at lunch, and often Parisian executives have none. French wine consumption has plunged from 120 litres a year per person in the 1960s to less than 50 today, but the quality of the product has greatly improved in every region.
A British friend and longtime Paris resident told me how his French-educated children had criticised his embarrassing cross-Channel habit of pouring vast glasses of wine and chugging it like beer.
Speaking of beer, beware of the high alcohol content of brews such as the Belgian Affligem, which sometimes approaches that of wine. It only takes a couple of demis to make that crosstown walk home a bit harder than you expected.
And now to sweat it out
One drawback of Paris’s high population density is the lack of green space. The green spaces that do exist are either not very green — French garden designers do love their white gravel — or ban people from walking or sitting on what little grass there is.
For joggers and cyclists, the solutions are either the voies sur berges, the routes on either side of the Seine (in the city centre, motor vehicles are permanently excluded from both river banks) or the expansive woodlands of the Bois de Boulogne in the west and the Bois de Vincennes in the east.
Don’t forget the city’s numerous public swimming pools either — or their strict rules on types of bathing costumes to be worn to preserve hygiene and deter sexual predators. For women that means no monokinis or microkinis; for men, no baggy Bermuda shorts — the preference is for tight-fitting trunks.
One good option is the Piscine Joséphine Baker on the left bank in the 13th, but there are 40 other public pools listed by the Paris municipal government to choose from. The famous Molitor pool, dating from 1929, is now part of a private hotel and spa run by Accor.
Lastly, the city has a healthy number of public tennis courts, bookable online, including in the middle of the Jardin du Luxembourg, and a plethora of private yoga studios.
For someone who has lived in smoky New Delhi and smoggy Hong Kong, perhaps the best thing about Paris for me is that the air you breathe, whether eating or exercising, is remarkably clean. As I write this, the air-quality index app on my phone shows a reading of 18, well into the “good” green zone and better than I ever saw in either of those Asian cities.
Tonight perhaps I will drink a toast — modest in quantity and high on quality — to the healthiness of the French capital.