There is so much to look forward to in the months ahead - to lengthening evenings, bike rides past fields of sunflowers or wild meadows of bluebells and poppies (just like the seventies Flake ad) and several months of fetes, vide greniers (car boot sales) and barbecues in friends' gardens. And I cannot wait to get back to see if Andy Lawton has called... After reaching the heights as a successful fashion editor, Karen said goodbye to all that and set about renovating a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, in central western France, and living a simpler life. Her idyll is almost complete when she is blissfully ensconced in her fully plumbed, tiled, floored and 'warm as the hug of a pashmina' Maison Coquelicot - until, that is, a gang of macho Portuguese builders, a procession of Brits behaving badly and the ghosts of boyfriends past begin to arrive on her doorstep. Karen soon finds her (dancing) feet in the small rural community when she discovers the key to acceptance is le danse country. And after a few shuffles and twirls she meets the love of her life - he has dark, shaggy hair, four paws and a wet nose...

Consultant dietician: Dr. Mabel Blades BSC RD.

A healthy and delicious way to lose weight

Discover the centuries-old secrets that help French women stay slim

No calorie counting

Transform your health with simple changes to your diet and lifestyle

A simple but effective weight loss plan that does away with counting calories and eliminating food groups. Backed up by modern science, 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, the book is part memoir and part diet plan, underpinned by some interesting snippets of French history and a lot of modern science. It is not just about weight loss, but the simple lifestyle changes that you can make to improve your overall health.

Instructed by her doctor to lose 10kg (1st 8lb) for health reasons, the author, a former fashion and beauty editor, had a light bulb moment 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 broth that the queen ate 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.

Discover:

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