The Marie Antoinette Diet is based on the eating habits of the 18th-century French queen and generations of French women since. A recipe for painless and delicious weight loss, it is peppered with interesting snippets of French history and served up with a lot of modern science. It is packed with useful tips and information, not just about weight loss, but for improving your overall health with some simple lifestyle changes.

The author, a cake-loving, former fashion and beauty editor, gained 10kg (1st 8lb) while living in France and was determined to lose it for health reasons. A light bulb moment occurred while reading a biography of Marie Antoinette. The French queen ate cake for breakfast and was fond of hot chocolate, but seems to have known instinctively what scientific studies have recently shown: for example, it is not what you eat, but when you eat it. Inspired by Marie Antoinette’s eating habits, and using a recipe for the health-boosting ‘wonder’ soup that the queen ate for dinner every evening, the author created a diet that allowed her to lose 10kg in 10 weeks – while eating normally most of the time. No calorie counting, no food groups excluded and yes – if you follow a few simple rules – you can eat cake.

The Marie Antoinette Diet reveals:

• Why eating cake for breakfast promotes weight loss
• The benefits of a 12-hour night fast
• How to rejuvenate and re-energize your body
• Why diets that ban dessert are doomed to failure
• What we can learn from the 18th-century diet
• The centuries-old secrets of slimming à la française
• The recipe for Marie Antoinette’s health-boosting ‘wonder’ soup
• How to kill cravings for junk food
• The simple changes that will transform your health
• The ‘chill pill’ of the nutrient world
• The (deeply unfashionable) meat that can help weight loss
• The fats that you should be eating (they’re not the ones that you might think)
•Nutritious and slimming soups for every season