She is known for her indulgent attitude towards food, and her sensual and colourful description of it on her cooking shows, but Nigella Lawson's most recent confession might make you feel a little dizzy. So passionate is she about food that she owns a whopping 4500 food books.

The celebrity chef, who recently lost almost 20 kilograms, was asked in an interview about how she manages to keep coming up with new recipes. Her answer? Feeding her imagination with books, books, books.

"I am a complete food book junkie," she said, adding that she reads each and every one of her 4500 food books.

"It’s not that I read them and then copy a recipe. It’s that I might suddenly be reminded of an ingredient I hadn’t used for a while."

Her own cookbooks are written with a strong aim to use language "to evoke nonverbal languages" such as taste and smell, another reason that owning so many books might help. "My love of language and my love of food are very much intertwined."

The cookbook author and TV food show host has also adjusted her own lifestyle to be healthier, even though she has always been a staunch advocate of real food that includes dollops of butter and mountains of cream where a recipe calls for it.

She believes that living healthily does not equate cutting out these ingredients, choosing to live by the French saying: "everything in moderation, even moderation itself."