Overhauling her food saw Madeleine Shaw’s energy soar and cleared up her IBS. Now the nutritionist is sharing her secrets with us

CHEF and nutritionist Madeleine Shaw’s diet plan doesn’t just help her clients become healthier in the kitchen - it’s improving their relationships too.

“One of the things that comes up all the time, is that people on the programme say they’re less irritable,” reveals the 25-year-old, laughing.

“They say, ‘My boyfriend or my husband or my partner, or whatever, is so happy because I’m less of a moody cow!’”

Hiring Shaw as a nutritionist may not be realistic for all of us, but at least her first book — Get The Glow — ensures we can try her methods at home instead.

“The programme’s really holistic,” says Shaw. “It looks at cutting out sugar, eating healthy fats and also thinking positively — not only about your health, but about food. It talks about mindfulness and meditation to combat stress. The last chapter is called Live Your Glow, which is of huge importance to me; it’s not just about these six weeks, it’s about living it long-term.”

Shaw is radiant, positively glowing with health, but she admits she hasn’t always had such a balanced approach to eating, describing her previous relationship with food as “torturous”.

Up until her late teens, she says she ate “a typical magazine diet of Diet Coke and low-fat yoghurt” in a quest to stay skinny, assuming that low-fat options were healthy alternatives to their full-fat counterparts, but found herself constantly counting calories and lumbered with a raft of digestive problems and energy slumps.

Eventually she revamped her attitude to food and got her IBS under control.

“People think a diet plan is going to be really boring and plain,” she adds. “When it’s like that, you start to hate food and hate dieting, so this programme’s about enjoyment.

“Every meal is delicious. I think you should enjoy everything you eat, you shouldn’t have to put yourself through something [torturous] because you think it’s healthy. I hope it’s something people really take on and think, ‘This is something I can do forever’.”

l Get The Glow: 100 Delicious And Easy Recipes That Will Nourish You From The Inside Out by Madeleine Shaw is published by Orion Books in hardback, priced £20 (£10.99 for eBook). Available now