Strict diet
Nutritionist Ade Samuels suggests a strict diet: lots of oily fish, no sugar, no red meat, no alcohol and only one shot of caffeine a day. He is also fond of oats, fruit smoothies, pumpkin seeds and tofu.
I look at his suggestions and feel glum. Gone is my delightful cava, my beloved lamb chops and blue brie, Lindt chocolate and my adored full-fat cappucinos. I usually skip breakfast and eat plentifully and late, but Ade insists I eat a light dinner before 7.30pm. Somehow it feels as if the sparkle has been taken out of my life. My fitness fairy godmothers, Tracey Burnette and Joanna Saudade, are weight-lifters and fearsomely efficient.
I'm to have three hourly sessions with them a week. They scrutinise my out-of-condition body with a mixture of hawk-like professionalism and compassion.
'To make any changes to your body in this short period of time, you'll have to work hard, but if you over-train you'll injure yourself,' says Tracey.
'So a lot of the changes will come from your diet; you're going to have to be incredibly strict with this. Are you committed to this programme?' I gulp, nod and assure her I am.
Tracey and Joanna work on improving my strength, flexibility and posture through weight training, abdominal exercises and core stability exercises (which tone the corset of muscle round the torso). I do a lot of lunging, a huge number of lateral raises and often find myself sitting on a Swiss ball.
I've never done weights before and am laughably puny, but Tracey and Joanna encourage me through increasingly hefty sets of weights each week. I walk away from each session feeling shaky, yet empowered. For the first two weeks, my muscles are stiff and aching, and I no longer walk, but hobble.
Normally, to comfort myself, I'd reach for a glass of cava or indulge in a large bar of chocolate, but all my treats are denied me. I'm finding my new diet hard to stick to and after a week order a kofte kebab at a Middle Eastern restaurant. I eat it as though in a trance and the greasy residue in my mouth reproaches me for hours afterwards.
For the rest of the evening, I feel incredibly guilty. This sensation is so intense that I don't break the diet for the rest of the challenge.
If you're trying to lose weight you simply cannot drink. I now see that much of my social life is based on alcohol.
In week two of the challenge, I go out for a girlie reunion at an Italian restaurant and find the only things I can order are soda water, a portion of vegetables and salad (hold the dressing). The evening seems hollow. I moan about my plight to my friends, who nod sagely, before blithely ordering yet another bottle of chianti. As they become progressively inebriated, I find myself getting bored. I finish my soda water, say my premature goodbyes and wend my sober way home.
So I replace socialising with exercising, supplementing the personal training sessions with classes at my local gym.
From never showing my face in the place, I'm a daily habitué. Kick-boxing, Powerpump, step aerobics — you name it and I'm bouncing about at the front of the class.
The first fortnight sees me red-faced and ungainly; I stumble through the step aerobics choreography and wheeze in the water breaks.
But after a couple of weeks, I start to get the hang of it. Every evening, instead of chatting on the phone to friends, cooking rack of lamb for a dinner party or popping out for a drink, I grimly don my tracksuit and shuffle to the gym.
I trudge home, eat my vegetables and baked mackerel (small), put on the TV and do abdominal exercises in the ad breaks.
I'm exercising six days a week for up to two and a half hours a day — far more than my pair of personal trainers have advised.
Midway through the challenge, though I've lost half a stone, I still can't see much change in my body shape, and my motivation is flagging.
So I enlist hypnotist and Neuro-Linguistic Programming expert Jeremy Moore to give me a boost — handily, he's also an Olympic rowing coach.
He gets me to see myself vividly as superwoman and visualise changing my internal energy from negative (a sludgy green colour) to positive (a vibrantly whirling bright pink).
Feeling energised
After the session, I feel light, energised and even more inclined to exercise. So, instead of dreading the personal training sessions, they have become the highlight of my week.
By week four, I have started doing the type of weight-lifting you see in bodybuilding competitions. I look at myself in the mirror and instead of seeing a flabby weakling I get a glimpse of a fit woman. I'm elated.
But if my training is going well, my diet isn't. Because I decide I'm not losing weight fast enough, I decide to start to cut down on some of the nutritionist's suggestions.
Now, I have porridge (with two teaspoons of honey) only three times a week, and savour every mouthful.
Otherwise, I eat a can of mackerel or fruit for breakfast, followed by a salad for lunch.
For dinner, I have a small portion of fish or chicken with lots of vegetables. Snacks are fruit or carrot sticks washed down by vats of green tea. This diet is so monotonous it is slowly driving me insane.
After a month, something bizarre happens. Being deprived of the diet I want has given me a mild eating disorder — all I can talk about is food, weight and exercise.
I spend hours on the internet reading recipes, question friends minutely about their recent meals out and have even started to chew chocolate and then spit it out to 'get the taste' — a disgusting strategy which I'd never have dreamed of doing before this supermodel challenge.
I even have several vivid (and extremely satisfying) dreams in which I binge on cream cakes.
My scales dominate my world and I cry when I feel I haven't lost weight quickly enough.
I feel that I've become stupid, because I have so little spare mental energy for concerns other than weight loss that I've even stopped reading books or caring about current affairs.
After five weeks
Five weeks into the challenge and my slimming madness tells me I'm still not thin enough, so against the advice of my nutritionist, I go on a juice fast.
I buy a job lot of organic apples, beetroot, carrots and ruby grapefruits and settle in for three full days of insanity.
I have juice for breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus the odd cup of white tea for comfort. I drink the juice from a champagne flute to make it feel glamorous.
I am too weak to exercise or even think straight, and spend the time gazing at photographs of chocolate torte with pecan praline.
The juice fast does the job, and I lose almost half a stone.
Finally, it is the last day of the challenge. I hop on the scales and find I have lost 9 per cent body fat — that's one and a half stone.
I have spent six weeks wearing tracksuits and baggy T-shirts, so dig out my 'thin' clothes (last seen six years ago) and have a glorious session trying them on.
Where once my jeans dug in, creating red weals on my bare flesh, now they hang loosely. Mini-skirts look delightful, floral vintage dresses are cute.
I want to feel like this forever
My new-found strength means I can carry shopping bags and don't even blanch at heaving furniture up and down stairs.
I feel light and at ease with my body, no longer experience pain in my neck or shoulders, and stand up straight. I want to feel like this forever.
Then I head straight for a local patisserie and gorge on a choux bun filled with cream. My mind almost explodes with pleasure. Of course, to have a bona fide supermodel body I'd need to lose another two stone, implant steel rods in my legs to make me several inches taller and consider a boob job.
But to get this particular body was hard enough.
I disregarded expert advice and cheated by juice-fasting. I had to sign over my old life, turn exercise into my day job, stop socialising and ended up weeping a lot.
Though I introduced exercise into my life, which was wonderful, I also veered dangerously close to developing an eating disorder.
In short, to get thin quickly you have to accept you'll go temporarily mad.
What's more, I had the help of a dedicated team of nutritionists, personal trainers and a hypnotist.
Celebrities have the spare time and expert support required to get in shape in six weeks and stay that way, but normal women don't.
Two months later, however, and I'm following Tracey's exercise maintenance plan twice a week, drink a lot less alcohol and eat far less chocolate, red meat and dairy products.
I haven't regained any weight and desperately hope I can maintain my delightful new body shape.
Because if I don't, I know I'm unlikely to be able to endure the pain and insanity required to claw it back again.
¦ London Fitness: 020 7736 8787; www.londonfitness.co.uk Jeremy Moore: 07904 117 663; www.justbewell.com
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