The Diet Doctors' eating advice

Fad diets have dominated the headlines and our lives in recent years, each promising thin thighs and trim tummies, usually thanks to a restrictive diet that leaves us craving variety or gnawing the furniture to curb hunger pangs. Wendy Denning and Vicki Edgson, with their book and TV show, are promoting a plan that focuses on health first, with inches to follow.

Of course, there are several diets and gurus these days that don't just help you lose weight but purport to solve your health ills. So what's the difference with the Diet Doctors? A real doctor, they say. Wendy Denning is a qualified GP with more than 20 years' experience in medicine and has also trained in acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Her partner Vicki Edgson is a qualified nutritionist with a private practice in central London.

Their book The Diet Doctors Inside and Out provides guidelines for evaluating your health at home, using your observations about your hair, skin, nails, tongue and faeces as clues. Then it provides recipes and strategies for eating your way back to good health.

And unlike your average GP, who in the rush to handle their patient load can only focus on single problems such as obesity or low energy, the Diet Doctors approach looks at the whole person.

The real meaning of diet
'We've gone back to the original sense of the word 'diet', which is to nourish, to nurture and to feed,' says Edgson. People associate dieting with limitation, she says, but their holistic approach focuses on not just cutting the bad foods out but getting the good foods in.

And our bodies are telling us what we need, they say, through everything from the appearance of our tongue, the texture of our hair, the clearness of our skin and the consistency of our faeces. For example, a pale tongue can indicate a vitamin or mineral deficiency in the body, while peeling nails hint at insufficient stomach acid and protein.