The Dukan Diet: Want to stay slim forever? Eat whatever you want - except on Thursdays

Over the past two days, the Mail has introduced the Dukan Diet - a revolutionary slimming plan that has taken France by storm. It promises fast, effective weight loss, followed by an eating plan that ensures you stay slim while, incredibly, allowing you to enjoy unlimited quantities of delicious food.

Yesterday, Dr Pierre Dukan detailed the first two phases of the diet. Today, he explains how, once you've reached your target weight, you can keep the pounds off for ever.

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Revolutionary: You can eat whatever you want on the Dukan diet

When you do finally reach the slimline target weight of your dreams you certainly deserve a few of the indulgences you've been denying yourself for so long - a congratulations to yourself for doing so well.

But be warned - this new slimline self does not 'belong' to you quite yet.

A body that is losing weight has one sole objective: to recover all the fat it has lost as soon as possible. It will trigger hunger pangs and sharpen your appetite, reduce your energy consumption, taking you into a kind of hibernation (you may feel unduly tired or cold) and it becomes ruthlessly efficient at assimilating the calories from your food. Each morsel is sifted through and everything possible is absorbed.

These factors combine to transform the overweight body that has just slimmed down into a calorie sponge, which makes you very vulnerable to piling the pounds back on again.

This is why diets so often fail in the long term.

To combat this, the third stage of the Dukan Diet - the Consolidation Phase - provides a crucially important period of transition between hardline dieting and a return to normal eating.

Clinical evidence shows that the high-risk period for regaining weight after a diet lasts about five days for every pound lost (that's a month for every six to seven pounds, and 100 days for a loss of 18-20lb).

But don't despair, if you have badly missed steak and kidney pie, a spicy curry, or if you have been longing to finish your meal with a real dessert, your time has come to indulge again. 

In the Consolidation Phase you follow a more open diet, but one which is not yet free from all constraints. Nourishing yourself is not just about taking in enough calories to survive; it is also, more importantly, about enjoying eating as part of that process.

It is now time to reintroduce this biological pleasure, this vital reward which was taken away from you while you were losing weight.