JANET Moore stripped off and stood naked in front of the mirror, gazing at the flabby sight before her. The book on body building for women by Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger had advised her to tear off her clothes and pinpoint exactly which areas she most wanted to change.

Staring at her bulky size 18 reflection - the flabby arms, double chin and rolls of flesh - the blonde 22-year-old fell into despair. She scrutinised her dimpled thighs and realised she would only be truly happy if she changed her entire body.

"I sat and cried for ages because it was all awful. My thighs were so big they used to rub together and I had constantly been on diets which never worked. I tried them all," recalls Janet, now 37.

"But, the next day, I went down to the gym and pointed to a girl in the body building book and said, 'right, I want to look like her'."

That was 16 years ago and, since then, with an amazing amount of dedication and self-sacrifice, she has achieved her dream to become a top body builder. Today, after months of denying herself chocolate, alcohol and fast food, and following hours of training each day, she will line up with other equally resolute females from across the world when the Miss Universe competition gets underway in Newcastle City Hall.

Sporting a spangly bikini, she will flick back her bright, blonde locks and pose under the ruthless glare of the spotlight.

Janet, a barber, now leads a completely different life to the one when her favourite meal was fish and chips with slices of white bread and lashings of butter. Gone are the days when she would opt for the latest faddy diet (including the muffin diet where you were supposed to just eat muffins, but Janet ate them along with everything else) and jog around the block in a feigned stab at exercise, collapsing on her return.

"You just have to re-educate yourself so you are eating the right amount of protein, carbohydrate and fat in the diet. If you eat lots of carbohydrate and you don't work it off, it ends up being stored as fat," says Janet, who won the Miss Britain title in May.

"I tend to feed my body all the time, but I'm eating the right foods so my body just gets leaner. Getting towards a show, I'll pull the vegetable and carbohydrates out of my diet to get that little bit leaner."

To get "that little bit leaner" she sticks to drinking plenty of water, eating lots of turkey with no sauce and eating six protein-rich egg whites for breakfast. Little wonder she gets strange stares at the supermarket when people peer into her trolley filled with turkey, water and eggs.

"For breakfast, I crack the eggs into a bowl and put the yolk in the bin and the rest I microwave until it's a white jelly, then I eat it," she laughs, knowing it would turn the stomachs of most.

"I'm usually so hungry by the time I eat them, after I've exercised, that I'm not bothered. I've realised after competing for three years there's no point saying 'I'm going to do this 90 per cent' because you have to be behind it 110 per cent.

"There have been days when I've thought 'why am I doing this?' but then you remember your goal and what you're striving towards."

To keep her body in peak condition, Janet works out at the Gold Star Health Club in Heaton, Newcastle. Each day she is up at 5.45am and does an hour on her exercise bike, followed by walking the dog. At night, she goes to the gym for an hour of cardiovascular work, focusing on different areas of her body each day.

Fortunately, her partner of seven years, Peter Milne, is also a body builder and is incredibly supportive, but she says she sometimes wishes she could spend more time with her friends. "It is physically, mentally and socially draining," she admits. "I have a group of girls I'm very close to and we used to go into town, have a few drinks and have a pizza, but I can't do that."

Nor can she gorge on fast food after the competition. After last year's Miss Britain, the couple went out to an Indian restaurant and ordered piles of delicious food, including naan breads, rice and popadoms. But Janet, who lives in North Tyneside, could only eat two mouthfuls because her stomach had shrunk so much.

"I wanted to pig out, but I couldn't," she recalls. "Now I've learnt my lesson, I'll probably introduce vegetables and carbohydrates back into my diet slowly and, a couple of weeks later, have the girls around for a nice meal and a few drinks to thank them for being so supportive."

But alcohol actually plays a part the night before a contest. Janet will often have one or two glasses of wine, which she says goes straight to her head, to dehydrate her for the next day. In a competition where the tiniest amount of salt or sugar can make a huge difference, water retention is devastating. Water trapped between the muscle and skin is instantly visible to the judges who are looking for clean muscle definition.

But Janet, who is now a size eight to ten, enters the figure contest rather than the physique competition, which means she will be penalised if the judges think her shape is too masculine. They will be looking for wide shoulders, a tiny waist and a curvy bottom. It also means she paints her nails, has her hair cut and styled and slaps on layers and layers of fake tan - to show off the "cuts" of the muscle under the unrelenting lights.

Laughing at the way she applies her tan, like she is "creosoting a fence" she is quick to attack people who think she has taken steroids to turn her body around. "People might see me in the paper and think I've done steroids but it's taken me 16 years to look like this," she says. "It does get annoying. I think if I took them I would look masculine, which is not what the judges want."

Also at the show will be North-East father-of-two Eddy Ellwood who is seeking his fifth Mr Universe title to mark his place in the Guinness Book of Records - a title Arnold Schwarzenegger has won four times. Eddy has also already booked a place at a Chinese restaurant after the competition, whatever the result.

"I probably won't be able to stomach it, but I don't think I'll be able to stop myself either," says Eddy, 37, who owns Ellwood's Fitness World, in Hartlepool. "It can be frustrating before a competition, not only for me, but also the family because I can't even go out for meals because I'm on a diet. But the incentive of getting on stage and being the best you can be is enough to stay away from the junk food.

"I've been competing for 18 years, but I'll be hanging my trunks up after this one. I'll hopefully be entering strong man competitions where you can eat a lot more calories, but it doesn't mean I'll end up like some of the fatties you see on television."

After 16 years in the spotlight, Janet is also considering taking time out. "I feel as if I need some time off from thinking about dieting," she says. "But it depends what happens at the Universe. If God looks down on me and I do well, I might think again."