The From Monday to Friday, It’s Pilates, Organic Food and Early Nights. Come Saturday, It’s Binge Drinking and Even Drugs.

AS A Pilates instructor, Belinda Moss is meticulous about her healthy lifestyle. She eats only organic fruit and vegetables, never buys processed food, gets plenty of sleep and spends several hours each day keeping fit. But that’s only during the week.

At the weekends, she’s usually to be found drinking champagne all night in chic bars and nightspots – or nursing a particularly horrible hangover.

She’s one of a new breed of healthy hedonists: upwardly mobile, attractive young women (and men) who live squeaky-clean lives of irreproachable health and fitness during the week, only to go on a wild blitz of drinking, and in some cases drug-taking, at weekends.

It’s a pattern that is being repeated in boho metropolitan areas all over Britain, from Clifton in Bristol and London’s Notting Hill to Manchester’s Northern Quarter, Hockley in Nottingham and Glasgow’s West End.

It’s a punishing regime of feast and famine. But the healthy hedonists believe they can use a combination of healthy living, yoga and other strict exercise regimes to achieve a ‘balance’ in their lives.

Belinda, 36, from Essex, doesn’t do drugs, but she does admit to getting ‘blind drunk’ and ‘ stumbling home at 5am’ at weekends.

‘I feel that the amount of time I dedicate to working out and eating healthily during the week earns me some "naughty time" at weekends,’ she says.

Her weekdays are filled with a busy fitness schedule – running, boxing, aerobics, tennis and horse-riding – not to mention the 12 hours of Pilates sessions she teaches.

‘Becoming a Pilates instructor was tough,’ she says. ‘I had to learn everything about how the body works, which is why I eat so healthily during the week.

‘I make sure all the fruit and vegetables I buy are organic and I cook everything fresh – I wouldn’t dream of eating anything that’s pre-cooked or processed.’ A former banker, she is married to Ben, a director of a graphics company, and has two children, Jake, five, and Zak, two.

BELINDA appears to have an enviably healthy life. Breakfast is a bowl of Special K and a glass of orange juice, lunch is Ryvita with cottage cheese and dinner is usually fish and vegetables.

But at weekends, it’s another story, as she herself admits.

‘My biggest indulgence is alcohol.

My favourite drink is Laurent Perrier champagne – I can drink it all night,’ she says.

‘Wine makes for a messy night – though I still drink it, my hangover the next day is horrific.

‘Last weekend, I donned my favourite DG dress and met friends in the swanky bar at the Sanderson hotel in London.

We got through three bottles of champagne between the four of us before we left at 11pm to go to the new hotspot, Penthouse, where I drank champagne for the rest of the night. I didn’t get home until 5am.

makes it particularly difficult – they woke me up after just two hours of sleep.’ Belinda is adamant that her weekend drinking never affects her job, but she is equally determined that her clean- living weekday persona should not stop her ‘having fun’ at the weekends.

Her story is only too familiar to Martin Plant, professor of addiction studies at the University of the West of England.

‘It’s paradoxical but it happens quite a lot,’ he says. ‘It’s fashionable to look after yourself and look good. And it’s also fashionable, in this country, to go out and get completely plastered.’ Research has shown a dramatic increase in binge drinking by young women. One study showed that the number ending up in hospital with mental health problems linked to alcohol has gone up by 9 per cent in seven years.

Though there have yet to be studies showing its effect on other aspects of health, doctors and police are concerned about increases in sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancy, sexual assaults and injuries or deaths in accidents.

‘It’s no longer taboo for a young woman to be seen to be drunk or to go out drinking with her girlfriends,’ says Professor Plant.

The most alarming trait of the healthy hedonists is their absolute conviction that they are fundamentally leading healthy lifestyles.

Personal trainer Howard Pearson of the Laboratory Spa Health Club in North London is unequivocal about what they are really doing to themselves.

‘When you go on a drinking binge, you poison yourself. On Monday and Tuesday, you’ll still be recovering from it, so you won’t be working out properly,’ he says.

‘Anyone who lives a life like this is much more focused on keeping slim and having the right body image than on their actual health. The bottom line is that if you were really interested in health, you wouldn’t go on binges.’ It doesn’t help that plenty of healthy hedonists don’t just stop at drink when it comes to weekend bingeing sessions.

Accountant Maggie Taylor is a 25-year- old singleton living in Notting Hill, West London. She had already drunk several cocktails by the time she snorted three lines of cocaine in her favourite trendy bar at 10.30pm on Friday.

Wearing a sexy Chloe top and jeans, she felt a million dollars. By the time she found her way home at 4am, she was still ‘buzzing’.

Unable to sleep, she smoked a cannabis joint, which knocked her out until 2pm, when she had a greasy all-day breakfast at Tom’s (owned by Tom Conran), another trendy Notting Hill establishment, before preparing herself for her best friend’s party in Kensington.

‘I knew it was going to be huge,’ she says. ‘After a few bottles of champagne, the stakes were raised and I took Ecstasy, not something I would normally do after a big Friday night, but I didn’t care.

‘I felt slightly guilty on the Sunday about my hedonistic weekend but knew that I would make up for it during the week.

‘On a weekday, I am a completely different person. I take my job seriously and don’t go out socialising. I go to the gym three nights a week and run before work at least twice a week.

‘After a good workout, I feel as if I’ve flushed away the toxins from the weekend. I practically live in Fresh Wild, an organic food shop round the corner from my flat, and have just bought myself a juicer so that I can make healthy drinks to take to work.

‘I know my life seems hypocritical – for example, I am against going on the Pill because I don’t agree with pumping my body full of chemicals on a daily basis, and yet I take drugs because they make me feel good. But I don’t see why the two lifestyles should be mutually exclusive.

‘As long as I am in control of my weekend habits, I don’t see a problem.

After a particularly heavy weekend, I will be even more obsessively healthy during the week as a way of punishing myself because it makes me feel less guilty.

‘I’m sure I will slow down eventuallybut I can’t see myself giving up either lifestyle in the near future.’ Unfortunately for Maggie and those like her, ‘the near future’ might not be quite as healthy as they are deluding themselves.

Steven Lanzet, clinical director at Lifeworks addiction treatment centre in Surrey, treats a lot of healthy hedonists.

‘In my experience of addictive personalities, they are excellent at compartmentalising things,’ he says.

‘In one compartment is the belief "I am a totally healthy person who drinks wheatgrass juice and does yoga" and in another is the belief "I have every right to cut loose at the weekends and I’m not harming myself because I’m going to make up for it during the week."

‘But at some point this becomes unsatisfactory. Maybe the person is lonely and realises their lifestyle is preventing them from meeting a partner, or perhaps their health starts to suffer. That’s when people end up having treatment.’ Suzanne Johnson, 29, is a stockbroker from Chelsea, West London, who eats organic food religiously and practises yoga for 90-minute sessions four times a week.

But at weekends she goes out with her girlfriends to ‘party hard’ on wine – and cocaine.

‘I know my lifestyle seems strange to some, but I feel that I have the balance just right,’ she says.

‘My healthiness during the week counteracts my hedonism at the weekends. As long as I only go mad two nights a week, I don’t worry.’ Suzanne’s weekly habits sound like a monastic regime of squeakyclean propriety.

An Ashtanga yoga session at the fashionable Life Centre in Kensington is followed by fish and a salad or vegetable bake from an organic food store such as Planet Organic. Bedtime is a virtuous 10.30pm, to ensure she’s refreshed for work the next day.

Oh, what a contrast with the weekends, when she goes out with her girlfriends – and her nights follow a predictable pattern as she puts her life in danger with an appalling cocktail of illegal drugs.

‘Last weekend, I went to the Electric Brasserie in Notting Hill for dinner,’ she says. ‘I met three girlfriends for an aperitif, which quickly turned into two bottles of champagne between us.

‘I ate more at that meal than I had the rest of the week put together.

‘We got through almost four bottles of wine between us before moving on to a trendy club on the Kings Road.

‘I often take cocaine and last Friday was no exception.

EVERY summer I spend a fortnight in a rented villa in Ibiza – and that for me is an extended weekend.

‘I do take drugs, but rather than Ecstasy, which is often cut with nasty things such as rat poison, I take pure MDMA.’ Leela Miller, head yoga teacher at the trendy Triyoga Centre in Primrose Hill, North London, has heard all the justifications and arguments many times before.

‘Students come to my classes and then they go out and party. I don’t know how they can rationalise it,’ she says. ‘This is particularly true with yoga, which is all about selfawareness, love and creating a positive environment for yourself and other people. Recreational drugs and alcohol are all about deadening that environment – as far as I’m concerned the two are diametrically opposed.’ So what effect does such a lifestyle have on your body?

Howard Pearson pulls no punches.

‘It dehydrates you and puts the main organs under massive stress,’ he says.

‘In the short term, you can deal with it but it will take its toll on the heart, liver and kidneys in the long run.

‘Women who behave like this may be able to maintain slim, attractive figures, but at what cost?

It’s a ticking time-bomb.’ ADDITIONAL reporting: CORRIE JACKSON