ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: The only thing you'll lose on a faddy diet is your sanity!

The other day someone sent me a diet that had been posted on the Instagram account @whineywine.

First published in Vogue in the 1970s, it recommends drinking a bottle of white wine a day and eating a sirloin steak and three hard boiled eggs.

I actually thought I might try it, for that’s how bonkers dieting can be.

Instead, I signed up for Zoe, the popular regime which requires you to fit a blood sugar monitor on your upper arm and claims to make you healthier and less tired. Oh, and lose some weight.

Who knows if it will make a difference. It probably will for a bit, like all the other diets I have dabbled with over the years.

But the key question is not whether they work but why I – and millions of others – attempt them.

The key question is not whether they work but why I – and millions of others – attempt them. Losing weight, as any fool and even most intelligent people know, is about eating less – as my boyfriend frequently reminds me.

Losing weight, as any fool and even most intelligent people know, is about eating less – as my boyfriend frequently reminds me.

‘Move more, eat less, mainly plants, and drink less wine,’ he chants whenever I raise the subject.

Of course I know this as well as I know that if I want my hair shorter I need to take scissors to it.

But the thing about diets is that they escape such basic logic and defy common sense.

Rather than taking the obvious solution, we persist in believing there’s some other way, some magic trick.

It might be eating cottage cheese and grapefruit or driving the body into a state of ketosis – when the body burns fat instead of glucose for energy – by eating only high-fat meals.

It could also mean signing up to a regime of counting points for every pistachio nut eaten, as if doing the maths will do the trick.

Perhaps the reason so many of us like the idea of a new diet is that it takes some of the boredom out of restriction-eating.

Also, there’s the possibility that although we know all too often at the end of a diet that it’s back to business as usual, this time we may just have unlocked the key to a new eternal slimline person.

Zoe doesn’t term itself as a diet but a way of understanding how different foods affect your individual body. Let’s see how that pans out this time.

Why Barbie may have killed Birkies

Last week’s flotation of Birkenstock on Wall Street didn’t go as well as expected. This was no big surprise to me. Investors need to think that shares have growth potential, but Birkenstock could have reached its own ceiling.

These cork-soled, originally orthopaedic shoes, have been leading members of the cult of ugly shoes.

But the reason such ugly shoes are popular is that they are not mainstream. They are not worn because they look like something on a Green Party activist, but despite that – like much of fashion – they are fashionable because they turn conventional ideas of pretty and acceptable on their head.

Cult of ugly shoes: Barbie star Margot Robbie in her Birkenstocks

But Birkies are being devoured by their own popularity. With so many men and women slopping around in them, they are losing the elan that once made the clonky ugliness desirable.

They even featured in Barbie for heaven’s sake, held up as a totem of women in the real world, opposed to the high heels of Barbieworld. Surely the death-knell for any fashion trend.

Now I’ll never the allure of Holly

Somehow, I never watched Holly Willoughby on ITV’s This Morning. The programme has never been a pressing appointment in my day and although I was mildly curious about her success, I reckoned there would always be tomorrow.

Now she has gone, the opportunity has been snatched away. And I feel slightly diminished by never having watched this figure of popular culture on the sofa in all her daytime pomp.

Wagatha epic doesn’t need any extra time

One of the downsides of having to choose between so many new TV streaming services is that much of their content is over-long because of the need to spread shows out over many episodes.

Coleen has already been interviewed to tell much of her side of the story. How much new is there possibly to say.

I’ve finally watched the Apple+ documentary, Supermodels, and although there’s much to be intrigued by, it simply didn’t need to be four programmes.

I lost the will to live watching another slow descent of an anonymous jumbo jet, landing in one of the fashion capitals, or endless footage of crazed paparazzi.

Next up are three episodes of Coleen Rooney – The Real Wagatha Story, which I fear will make the same mistake.

There have already been hours of TV drama and even a stage play about her battles with fellow footballer’s wife Rebekah Vardy.

Coleen has already been interviewed to tell much of her side of the story. How much new is there possibly to say. Cue for lots of shots of WAGs stalking around with trophy handbags and Coleen loyally watching her man on the field behind sunglasses. Ninety minutes, I reckon, would easily do it.

A voyage back to the 80s with Rupert

There are some moments that bring home the passage of time. One such was last week when I went to the new touring production of John Mortimer’s Voyage Round My Father starring Rupert Everett, excellent in the role of the irascible, damaged father first played by Alec Guinness.

Seeing Everett turned into this man with the parchment skin and thinning grey hair of age was a disturbing shock.

It seemed only a few years back that he was on stage as the gay schoolboy Guy Bennett in the hit play Another Country – his lanky, mop-headed, insolent beauty a foil to a fellow pupil played by the young Kenneth Branagh in all his sturdy sandiness. But that was long ago – 1981. And the world in general was, indeed, another country.