If you ask me...six weeks to get a beach body? My simple plan will work faster than that

May is definitely the “six weeks to an amazing beach body” season, as decided by the International Committee for the Continuing Torment of Women (based in Geneva)

A group of models celebrate breaking the world record for the biggest swimsuit photo shoot at Bondi Beach on September 26, 2007 in Sydney, Australia. Australia's Cosmopolitan magazine and Venus Breeze joined forces to break the Guinnesss World Record for the Biggest Swimsuit Shoot, as more than 1010 bikini clad women attended the shot to celebrate 30 days of Fashion and Beauty. (Getty Images)

If you ask me, this is the time of year when, as a woman, you must brush all else aside and solely concentrate on attaining what is known as “a beach body” because it is not as if you can take any old body to the beach come the summer, and you certainly can’t take the body you have now. Quite what will happen if you take the body you have now to a beach is never specified, so it must be cataclysmically awful. Maybe the Beach Body Police will race in, drape you in blankets, throw you into the back of a van, and dump you by a road somewhere, anywhere, so long as it is firmly inland.

Whatever, and being a helpful person, I will talk you through how any attempt to acquire a “beach body” actually works in practice, and how it can work for you:

- Firstly, you will need to purchase as many women’s magazines as possible, starting right now, as May is definitely the “six weeks to an amazing beach body” season, as decided by the International Committee for the Continuing Torment of Women (based in Geneva). Suggested titles include Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Vogue, Glamour, In Style, Tatler, Harpers and Grazia, although it doesn’t really matter, as they are all much of a muchness and churn out the same stuff year after year, at the same time of year, as the staff are far too busy whooping over free handbags and spa treatments to ever think up anything new. Or interesting.

- Once you have acquired the magazines, you will now need to fixate on and develop an unhealthy obsession with all those models who have been Photoshopped and airbrushed and bronzed to an impossible perfection, and have the sort of sea-sprayed hair that doesn’t look like a mad, frizzled dandelion clock, as yours would. And does.

- Having judged your own body by such unattainable standards, enter a period of self-destructive, compulsive undereating of the kind that will inevitably be followed by a period of self-destructive, compulsive overeating. Do this until you have lost any normal relationship with food, your metabolism goes into melt-down and your self-loathing is such that you can hear it ringing in your ears.

- Finally, realise you haven’t lost an ounce, may even have put on a few pounds, and have achieved nothing bar a couple of months of sheer misery, but on a brighter note? Your self-harming skills will have improved considerably.

So that’s one way of doing it, although you could also, if you prefer, opt for my way, which means you must:

- Stay as you are.

- Refuse to give a toss.

The decision, as ever, is all yours.