Want to be as thin as Paris Hilton?

Eat a cheeseburger, says Bethenny Frankel, author of Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinnygirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, $16) and perhaps best known as one of the stars of Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City.

To be more accurate, Frankel's advice is to quit counting calories, quit obsessing over every bite you eat (or don't eat) and borrow some habits from the ''naturally thin'' women we all envy.

She cites Hilton because she used to be her nanny. And what she noticed was, when Hilton wanted a burger and fries, she got one, ate half the burger and a few fries and then quit.

Frankel, 38, is a natural foods chef and owner of BethennyBakes, which creates low-fat, low-calorie, dairy-free, wheat-free, egg-free baked goods. In addition to her Real Housewives stint, she was a finalist on Martha Stewart: Apprentice. She also has local roots: As a teen, she lived in the Fort Lauderdale area for two years and attended Pine Crest School.

She started dieting as a child and continued as a young adult. Her attitude changed after a trip to Italy, where she decided to eat any food she wanted and didn't gain weight. Her book outlines her system for eating well and maintaining a healthy weight, based on the principle that your diet is a bank account and what matters is the investments you make over time, not any one meal. We interviewed her about her book. Her responses have been edited for space.

Q: What led you to write this book?

A: I never had aspirations to write a book. I found the big golden key to the big golden lock, to teach people how to be naturally thin forever. And that's why the second title says, ''Unleash your skinnygirl and free yourself from a lifetime of dieting,'' because I was imprisoned by a lifetime of dieting, what I call food noise.

Q: Why are diets bad?

A: Diets are cookie-cutter and people's lives are not. Diets tell you everything that you're doing wrong, and what you can't do. What happens? You give the keys to the car to the diet and then the diet fails. And then you blame the diet, because you're not in control. Everyone flips to the back to see where that chart is to tell you what you're supposed to be eating. And if on that random Tuesday you're not in the mood for an egg white frittata, you rebel.

It's too constricting. You have to learn how to live within your own life. Diet books are for some fictitious la-la-land that people don't really live in. This book turns people's food noise into food voice, teaches them to have a good relationship with food. Which is the whole point, because people have become afraid of food. You get to the place where you think low-carb bars are good and fruit is bad. Or oil is the enemy or pasta is the enemy, and the truth is nothing is the enemy.

Q: Explain the guideline, ``You can have it all, just not all at once.''

A: They're all linked to the umbrella, which is your diet is a bank account. You can have it all. You can have chocolate cake. You can have pizza. You can have fried chicken. You can have onion rings. You can have anything in the world you want. You just can't have it all at once. You have to decide how to invest, when to invest and what's a good investment and what's a bad investment.

We all make bad investments in life, and with food. There's nothing wrong with that. You have to just make the right decision next. You're not going to have french fries for lunch and pizza for dinner and ice cream for dessert. You can have it all, you can't have it all at once. It's very liberating because people end up realizing it's not the last piece of cake they're ever going to see. That's where ''taste everything, eat nothing'' comes in.

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