Eat, drink and be merry: dieting's new philosophy - Amelia Hill

There is a new lifestyle ethos taking the most fashionable by storm. It is less of a diet, more of a magic cure-all. According to a range of A-list celebrities, this universal remedy promises to "break the bonds of diet despotism" while still enabling them to shed excess weight. In addition, this magic bullet is said to cure hangovers, kick-start lagging libidos and relieve premenstrual tension.

The regimen has been adopted by Sarah Jessica Parker, who is apparently particularly keen on nutritionist Esther Blum's advice to start the day with a vegetable omelette with strawberries. Sharon Stone has allegedly ditched her egg-white diet in favour of Blum's advice to fill up on egg yolks and butter. Even the famously thin Desperate Housewife Teri Hatcher is considering Blum's dictate to eschew the fat-free life in favour of a full-fat diet, rich in saturated oils.

"We live in a low-fat, fat-free culture, and women in particular have done their bodies a disservice, because we have disrupted our hormones to a quite phenomenal degree," said Blum, author of Secrets of Gorgeous: Hundreds of Ways to Live Well While Living It Up. "We have got ourselves to a stage where we can't comprehend that we need good fats to live a healthy life. We need fat to regulate our hormones. We need cholesterol to make oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone