The A-list diets

Every year, we gorge on advice from the rich and famous, from Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz to Victoria Beckham and Miranda Kerr, as to how we can achieve their enviable physiques. Serial dieter and New Yorker Rebecca Harrington, has tried them all, from the weird concoctions Elizabeth Taylor would consume to retain her hourglass figure and Liz Earle’s bleatings on the benefits of juicing, to the ‘sea vegetables’ Madonna existed on and the salt-water flush she used to channel her inner Beyoncé.

Today, Harrington, 29, is the same shape she has been for a while – she won’t reveal her weight or her dress size – but she stresses that with every celebrity diet she has tried, she put any weight she lost back on again immediately afterwards.

Now, she has rustled up I’ll Have What She’s Having, a witty, tongue-in-cheek book that charts her experiences of the weird and wonderful celebrity diets she has followed and the effects they had on her – a mix of fainting spells, spots and potential salmonella.

“When you google celebrities, you get celebrity diets at the top of the page. Almost everyone famous provides an eating plan, so it was an easy one to follow,” says the journalist and author.

“I think that Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet is a really good one, if you’re a millionaire, because all the ingredients cost so much, but a lot of the older celebrities follow regimes that were really gross. In many cases, dieting is just making normal food disgusting.”

She cites the late Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor, who would take a potentially delicious fillet steak and place it on a piece of bread slathered with peanut butter. Harrington tried it but couldn’t eat the concoction, despite being starving hungry.

“The steak’s juices mix with the peanut butter in an unappealing, oily way. I have three bites then throw the rest out,” she recalls.

Legendary Thirties’ actress Greta Garbo dieted throughout her life, loved fad diets and was a great follower of self-styled ‘doctor of natural science’ Gayelord Hauser, nutritionist to the stars. Harrington found her regime strange, to say the least.

“Some publications even speculated that the two were having an affair based around their shared love of disgusting food,” Harrington observes.

She tried to follow Hauser’s principles – he believed that if you fuel your body with ‘wonder foods’, such as brewer’s yeast, wheatgerm and molasses, you would live to be 100. But finding edible yeast in the shops was difficult, although Harrington found some in a health-food store that she could sprinkle on cereal. “Dinner was terrible, based on Hauser’s meal for Garbo the first night he met her – a veggie burger consisting of wild rice and chopped hazelnuts, mixed with an egg and fried in soybean oil, plus a dessert of broiled grapefruit with molasses in the centre.”

Harrington recalls that the veggie burger tasted predominantly of eggs, the hazelnuts were an unpleasant surprise and the grapefruit dessert tasted medicinal.

She says she gained weight on Cameron Diaz’s protein-rich diet, because it was more about bodybuilding than shedding pounds, following the basic tenets of combining protein with carbohydrates and eating salmon for dinner and nuts as a snack. Sounds normal enough, but Diaz’s favourite meal is said to be savoury oatmeal. And on Beyoncé’s diet, Harrington lost about 4.5kg in 10 days. “The problem is, you have to exercise for two hours a day on Beyoncé’s plan, and I just couldn’t fit that in and sustain it,” she recalls.

She followed Beyoncé’s Master Cleanse, which involved consuming only lemonade made out of cayenne pepper, lemons and grade-B maple syrup nine times a day. No food allowed. “You also have to consume something called the ‘salt-water flush’ (salt water that you drink while looking at yourself in the mirror), which is supposed to help your digestive tract.”

Among the worst of the diets was that adopted by Marilyn Monroe, Harrington reflects.

“That diet made you feel so bad because it was almost all cream. She ate raw eggs for breakfast every day. I thought I might get salmonella. Then, after a meal she’d have hot fudge sundaes.”

In contrast, Victoria Beckham’s ‘Five Hands’ diet – where you eat only five handfuls of food a day and then declare yourself full – was a lesson in abstinence. She started the first day with two eggs – small ones, as they had to fit into her palm. “I realise how little a palm actually holds,” she notes. “I do not have the self-control of Victoria. I didn’t have a fruit plate instead of a cake for my birthday, like she did in 2012 for example.”

Learning from one of Beckham’s autobiographies that she wears fake nails, Harrington considered following suit.

So what is her overall verdict? Are celebrity diets best avoided altogether?

“In some ways, the best thing you can do is to approach these diets moderately – take a hybrid approach to them,” she says.

“I definitely pay more attention to what I put in my mouth, but dieting is so regimented, it’s sad. Yet there’s this odd hopefulness to it,” she adds.

She says that on most of the diets, she did lose weight, but gained it back almost immediately after eating a slice of pizza.

“I think the main thing I realised is how terribly hard it is to be an ‘ideal’ woman at any time in history,” Harrington concludes with a sigh.

I’ll Have What She’s Having by Rebecca Harrington is published by Virago, and costs Dh65. Available now at Magrudy.com