If Size Zero isn’t small enough for you, how about Size Baby? The baby food diet has been the talk of LA ever since Hedi Slimane—formerly head designer at Dior—admitted to keeping his waistline super-svelte by replacing two meals a day with food created for newborns.

The bibs are also out for other baby food dummies, such as Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson. They all insist that they also eat normal meals, but nutritionists aren’t impressed, accusing the Baby Food diet of being a gimmick and only nutritionally balanced for babies.

From Vitamin injections to maple syrup some of our favourite stars seem to ‘absorb’ rather than eat real food

What celebrities are eating, or not eating, ranges from the relatively sane and medically endorsed GI diet for Kylie Minogue, to the Beyoncé’s bonkers diet of nothing but: water, cayenne pepper and maple syrup.

Based on the glycemic index, the GI diet is measured through how food affects our blood glucose levels. So a quick glance at Kylie’s shopping basket will reveal low GI slow-release foods such as porridge, bran and whole wheat pasta, plus a few treats such as dark chocolate, salted peanuts, shortbread and sugar-free jam.

Lots of ‘yang’, but no ‘ying’ foods, for macrobiotic diet fans

Gwyneth Paltrow’s healthy glow is said to come from her strict vegetarian macrobiotic diet. This consists of ‘yang’ foods such as seaweed and fermented soy products, wholegrain cereals, pulses, fruit, but certainly no evils like sugar or hot spices. These ‘yin’ foods exhaust mind and body apparently.

Get into the gourmet Zone with domestic goddess Nigella Lawson

It’s hard to believe that sensuous finger-licking TV chef Nigella would ever be on a diet. But she is. Fortunately, the Zone Diet is perfect for her as there’s no cutting back on any one food group; you simply eat the groups in certain proportions—a delicious pie-chart if you like—of: carbohydrates at 40%, fat at 30% and proteins at 30%.

The cult of the thin where ‘Skinny equals success’

A staggering 98% of us are unhappy with our figures. Four in ten of us are on a permanent diet. The mantra of our age is that being thin will get you noticed. It will get you that contract as a model, film star or pop singer.

In recent years there has been a shocking rise in the number of very young children suffering from eating disorders. Family problems, the pressure of school and a fear of growing up are usually blamed for triggering Anorexia or Bulimia. But now young girls are openly admitting to wanting to look like Victoria Beckham.

At 5ft 6ins, Mrs Beckham weighs less than 8 stone, and her waist is the same size as a seven-year old’s. However, she’s got pots of cash and a good-looking husband. So it’s not surprising they associate her body shape with a dream lifestyle.

One thing celebrities are reluctant to tell you is that the only way they can maintain their slender frames is to stay hungry. Marcia Cross, star of ‘Desperate Housewives’ admitted her life was ‘a living hell’ and she felt she had been banned from eating when she joined the show.

Victoria Beckham, maintains she hasn’t got an eating disorder, she’s just ‘disciplined’ about what she eats. But when you consider that she quizzes waiters to make sure there is no butter or oil on her salads, eats only fruit till 3pm, doesn’t eat portions that can’t fit into the palm of her hand and limits her intake to 500 calories for the rest of the day. You have to admit that’s some discipline! Most of us would crumble on such a punishing regime.

38% of British women are now classified as ‘overweight’

The hungry years

Weirdly, the more we try to keep up with our ever shrinking celebrities, the bigger we become. Thirty eight percent of British women are now classified as overweight.

Could it be all these diets are making us fat? Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Newcastle are conducting a study into the role the brain plays in making people fat. The theory is that people fail to lose weight, not because they cannot stop eating, but because they are not eating enough.

Back in the times when we were hunter-gatherers, starvation was common. So the body learned to turn off its metabolism and go into survival mode so it could live through the famine. But when an obese person tries to lose weight, they immediately feel hungry and their body reacts as if they were a five stone weakling.

This means that although food is plentiful, our brains have not re-programmed themselves to recognise that it’s not always necessary to kick-start survival mode when the food intake drops.

And until someone invents a wonder drug to help stop the obesity epidemic, we are going to continue fighting the battle of the bulge.

So before you are tempted to embark on yet the latest celebrity diet, it’s worth noting that probably no more than 10%–15% of people successfully manage to lose weight and keep it off using ‘fad’ methods.

The campaign for healthy eating

The question is, will we ever be happy in our own skins and have a decent relationship with food? With all the diets that label foods ‘good’ and ‘bad’ it’s as if we’ve forgotten how to eat properly. Rather than eating when we’re hungry, and stopping when we’re full, there are some of us who are locked in a binge and purge cycle. It’s not good for our health and it’s not good for our self-esteem.

Since when did slipping into a tiny, child sized pair of jeans, become such an amazing achievement. In the scheme of things, isn’t it all a bit shallow and meaningless?