Ex-Posh Spice Victoria Beckham, who recently gave birth to her third son Cruz, is desperate to lose weight after pregnancy. Despite her doctor’s warnings, the 30-year-old is so preoccupied with slenderness of her body that she even started following the controversial diet of her pal Liz Hurley.

The wife of Real Madrid star David Beckham was so impressed by Hurley’s famous weight loss after giving birth to her two-year-old son Damian that she called the actress to find out her slimming secrets.

"Liz spoke to Victoria about how she lost her weight after having Damian,” British magazine Closer quoted a close friend as saying. “She passed on tips, like not eating carbs after 5pm and only having one meal a day."

But Victoria’s doctor warns her about the risks of such one-meal-a-day diet that include contracting bone and muscle wasting conditions and even minimizing her chances of conceiving another child.

Elena Dalrymple, editor of Mother & Baby and the mother of a 16-month-old girl, says that such celebrities put “immense and unwelcome” pressure on ordinary new mothers to be thin, and urges the latter to ignore media images of slim celebrity mothers.

 “After having a baby, mums should be revelling in the joy of their new baby and eating well, so they can healthily breast-feed, not despairing about their body shape and semi-starving themselves. But the pressure from super-slim celebrity mums is so immense that ordinary mums feel they should have a film-star body and be back in their jeans just days after the birth,” she told British Times Online.

“Strict diets don’t make for happy motherhood. Mums will feel exhausted, snap at everyone around them and run the risk of spoiling those first precious months with their new baby.”