Changes

Most people will recognise that excessive stress is not good for you. It's the cause of depression, high blood pressure, skin problems and insomnia - to name just a few problems from a very long list. There's also mounting evidence that chronic stress is responsible for excessive weight gain and not just because there's a tendency (er, yes, I can testify to this...) to turn to comfort eating. Too many stress hormones in the body encourage fat storage - particularly in that ''obvious'' and very-hard-to-shift area around the middle. The aim of the De-Stress Diet is to bring about a slimmer, calmer person with a better quality of life.

Although this is called a 'diet' suggesting something you do for a period of time to get your weight down before you resume the old way of life and start piling the calories on again. This is more of an encouragement to change the way that you live and the way that you think about food. To begin with the promises are realistic: ''lose up to 10lb in 6 weeks'' is going to make you feel better about yourself and encourage you to continue but it's not a weight-loss regime such as many I've seen ('no pain, no gain') which mean that you lose muscle rather than fat - and set yourself up for long-term failure.