No Spanx! Beyoncé uses a bizarre (and very painful) slimming trick

Spanx, waist trainers, even corsets… there are plenty of ways to slim down your silhouette without hitting the gym, but Beyoncé's trick has to be the weirdest one we've heard yet.

The singer, who famously did the water-only Master Cleanse to shed the pounds for her role in Dreamgirls, is no stranger to going to extremes to look good.

But a new book about Bey's rise to fame reveals she once used something very strange indeed to get to illusion of a smaller waist… a roll of masking tape.

Beyoncé apparently once wrapped the thick tape around her waist as a makeshift corset, as she was unhappy with how she looked in a black catsuit she was dressed in for a video shoot.

"She took the strong cloth tape – pressure sensitive and most certainly never intended to be used on one’s skin – and started wrapping it around her bare waist," the Becoming Beyoncé biography by J Randy Taraborrelli details.

"I’m gonna corset my waist with this tape," Bey is quoted as saying.

The book also goes into detail about Beyoncé's notoriously private marriage to Jay-Z, stating the pair split for a year over rumours Jay-Z had been having an affair with Rihanna.