Entertainment

The Manhattan diet

In a city where foie-gras burgers are de rigueur, cupcake shops are as ubiquitous as Starbucks and after-work drinks can easily turn into all-night, Champagne-swigging affairs — how do Manhattan women manage to stay so damn skinny?

In her new book, “The Manhattan Diet,” out March 27 (Wiley, $24.95), author Eileen Daspin sets out to uncover the tricks, rules and regimens behind some of the borough’s tiniest bodies.

PHOTOS: HOW CITY WOMEN STAY SKINNY

THE MANHATTAN DIET PHILOSOPHY

Drawing on the secrets of her skinniest friends, Daspin reveals that Manhattan women don’t starve themselves — they eat good quality food and the occasional treat. Her 46-year-old friend Debi Wisch, who lives on Fifth Avenue and runs a jewelry business, is the perfect example. For breakfast, Wisch eats Fage yogurt with berries and fiber cereal. Lunch is a salad or a wrap. Dinner is fish and vegetables. She snacks a lot on cashews or blueberries, not junk food. If she wants something sweet, she grabs a piece of candy. “I try 90 percent of the time to be good and the other 10 percent just to enjoy,” she says. (Wisch, for the record, is 5-foot-4, weighs about 110 pounds and has “the arms of a 20-something.”)

Manhattan women, Daspin states, are also crafty about keeping temptation out of reach. They don’t keep “trigger foods” like peanut butter in their homes, she insists. And one of Daspin’s more extreme friends, who runs seven miles a day and has “perfect posture and a killer bod,” throws away any leftover food that entices her — pouring water over it for good measure.

Sauces are kept to a minimum. When dining on Chinese, one of Daspin’s friends only orders string beans and rice. “The oil on the string beans is enough to moisturize the rice,” she tells the author. “I eat with chopsticks, which helps [me] take smaller bites.” Daspin, for her part, only indulges in tiny tastes of high-calorie food, even though she’s married to an executive chef, Cesare Casella of Salumeria Rosi on the Upper West Side. “I use a teaspoon to scoop up a few grains of risotto,” Daspin writes. “I taste everything but eat almost nothing.”

Rather than staving off hunger with sugar-free snacks like Diet Coke and Tasti D-Lite, Manhattan dieters snack on a Tootsie Roll lollipop or 3 ½ Twizzlers for a daily rationed “cheat.”

“Really enjoy what you eat, but just eat less of it,” says Daspin, who is a size 10.

Other feel-full tricks include adding milk to green tea because “it tastes like melted green-tea ice cream,” Daspin writes. Dilute alcoholic drinks with water, seltzer or ice and load up on healthy, filling grains like quinoa, spelt, Kamut and rye. Eat what your body craves whenever it craves it, and if that means ground beef and peas at 7:30 a.m. or granola at 10 p.m., so be it.

Instead of buying in bulk, Manhattan women “buy small,” whether it’s a mini-bag of pretzels or individual cartons of hummus or Greek yogurt.

When shopping for food, quality expensive ingredients are encouraged over cheap thrills — Daspin urges readers to splurge on $12 organic maple syrup rather than $5 on a bottle of Aunt Jemima. The most popular snack for Manhattan women, Daspin says, is GG Bran crispbread, “the appetite-control cracker.”

Daspin instructs women to cook fresh produce as much as possible. Her best tip: Roast three days’ worth of vegetables with a drizzle of olive oil and salt, and save the extra to reheat throughout the week.

Finally, while many Manhattan women enjoy trendy workout classes, they also take part in a daily regimen that costs nothing and is simple for everyone to do: walking.

Daspin writes that “the typical New Yorker logs about 1.2 miles a day just walking to and from the bus or the subway.”

After all, when the sidewalk is your runway, it makes sense that you’d want to be in model form.

OTHER MANHATTAN DIETS:

Sarah Jessica Parker

“She claims to eat everything from lamb shanks to bagels with cream cheese, but she’s also helped popularize the Blue Print Cleanse and has been photographed sipping from one of the company’s baby bottle-shaped

containers,” Daspin writes. “The diet includes six juices a day, which add up to between 1,000 and 1,200 calories.”

Tina Fey

“When the ‘30 Rock’ star was 29, she lost about 35 pounds with Weight Watchers. That’s when she learned how to eat properly,” Daspin writes. “Before that, Fey has said she used to go all day without eating, then start snacking on cake and finish the day at McDonald’s.”

Anna Wintour

“Vogue’s legendary editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, maintains her model-thinness through a power lunch consisting of rare red meat and a salad with no salad dressing,”

Daspin writes.

Manhattan diet meal from Mario Batali

Batali’s Misticanza Serves six

“In Greek, fennel, the main ingredient here, means to grow thin, or so I’ve read,” Daspin writes. “Perhaps that’s why it’s so popular with dieters. I just like the flavor. Plus, anything Mario makes tastes good to me.”

Vinaigrette (Makes ¾ cup)

• ¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

• 1 teaspoon lemon marmalade or a generous pinch of grated lemon zest

• ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil, preferably Tuscan

Salad

• one small fennel bulb, trimmed

• 8 ounces radishes, trimmed

• 8 ounces arugula (two medium bunches), trimmed and spun dry

• Maldon or other flaky sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper

Whisk together the lemon juice, marmalade and olive oil in a small bowl. The vinaigrette can be refrigerated for up to three days.

Using a Benriner (a Japanese mandoline) or other vegetable slicer, thinly shave the fennel. Transfer to a medium bowl. Thinly shave the radishes and add to the bowl. Add the arugula and toss gently. Drizzle with half the vinaigrette, tossing gently. Season with salt and pepper and serve with the remaining vinaigrette on the side.

dschuster@nypost.com