How all those over-50 celebs get their bikini bodies

The answer’s gratifyingly painful!

LADIES, I apologise. The pictures here will be causing a range of feelings, and I’m sure not many are good.

There’s Sharon Stone, all 59 years of her, looking gorgeous in a bikini — one of those two-piece affairs you probably owned for a summer or two in the Eighties. Her figure is astonishing. Cut off her head (a bit harsh, but I bet some are tempted) and look at the body, and you couldn’t age it. You certainly wouldn’t put it above 30.

Then there’s Halle Berry. She turned 50 last August, and a month later was pictured posing on the beach in a tiny black number many 20-year-olds may be scared to wear outside a changing room. There were no lumps, bumps or overhang, and — pass me a 99 with an extra Flake — she had a six-pack.

You could console yourself by remembering Sharon and Halle knew the camera was on them, and had time to pull everything in and check sympathetic sun angles, but then Courteney Cox (aged 52), Cindy Crawford (aged 51) and Paul McCartney’s wife Nancy Shevell (aged 57) ruin it all by getting snapped by paparazzi looking beautiful while letting it all hang out — only nothing was hanging out.

Don’t get me started on Liz Hurley. Appalling luck with men, but no bad bikini pictures. She’ll be 52 in June.

Women my age — I turn 50 in September — will feel sadness and anger looking at these photos. Sad we didn’t relish our bikini days while we had them, and angry we let them go.

For surely, we think, looking at these women, it can’t be so hard to maintain a bikini-worthy body well into middleage? If only I wasn’t so greedy and lazy I, too, could look this good, couldn’t I? Cue the self-loathing and biscuit tin raids. Wrong. Let no one be fooled: a hellish world of hard work, discipline and hunger goes into those bodies.

Gwyneth Paltrow (not in the 50 club yet, but she’ll be welcomed with open arms) at least admits she ‘works her butt off’ to look as good as she does.

We are working against nature to aspire to a figure like that in our 50s. As we age, our muscle volume decreases, our metabolism slides and our calorie requirement is lower. A 20-year- old can get away with 2,000 calories a day; after 50, it’s just 1,600.

Dropping oestrogen levels in menopause cause fat to redistribute around the abdomen. With all the nutritionists and personal trainers in the world, you could try to shift it, but for those of us whose careers are not tied up in our looks, it’s nearly impossible.

For what these pictures don’t show is the hunger. That debilitating drag in your belly which can be put up with for a couple of weeks at best, before a holiday or wedding — any longer would drive us mad. Liz Hurley says she ‘likes’ to go to bed hungry. That’s what you’d have to deal with for a body like hers. No ice-cream, no wine, no ‘stuffed to the gills’ satisfaction.

Still envy Liz Hurley? Don’t look at her taut belly, just think of the rumble within and know she’ll never enjoy melting chocolate on her tongue, or a bag of hot chips. It will make those pictures easier to look at, believe me.

So how do they do it?