Why do women's hide-and-seek skills fail when it comes to chocolate?

According to research, this is the week when we realise once and for all that the New Year resolutions we set ourselves have manifestly failed.

Simply looking at my own list of things I hope to achieve in 2018, I can see immediately that I have failed conclusively to drive a tank, own a telescope, have a bit less disdain for people that think Father Brown's Boys is funny, or stop talking to myself so much.

To teach myself a lesson, I am going to buy myself a telescope and then get someone else to drive over it in a tank while I tell myself repeatedly how much of a failure I am.

Giving up smoking and new year fitness plans are the most likely of all to have bitten the dust: it's easy to plan a diet when you've had your head in a Quality Street trough for weeks, it's not so easy to stick to carrot sticks when you're no longer perpetually drunk.

Even the hard-liners we think are firmly on the wagon might not be.

Apparently, a huge number of female dieters lie to their friends and family about the amount they've eaten while many others hide food around the house to disguise their calorie intake. The most popular places to stash food include the washing machine and the oven – risky strategies by anyone's standards.

I was considerably less shocked by the fact that so many women hide food than I was to hear that some women's hiding abilities are so lame that their number one spot for moonshine chocolate is 'up their sleeve'.

Of course the point is that today's strong, beautiful women shouldn't feel they have to hide food up their sleeves in 2018 - not when they can stash if somewhere far less obvious so that no one else can steal it.

The key is to think of places that only you visit, activities only you participate in and things only you care about. In my house this would be:

1) In the middle of the next toilet roll. If needs must, other members of the family will place a toilet roll on top of the cistern, but this is a major concession.

2) Next to the vacuum bags. Changing a vacuum bag is disgusting, fiddly and requires having used the vacuum in the first place to realise it needs emptying.

3) Underneath the wet towels on the floor in the bathroom.

4) In a houseplant that needs watering.

5) Inside any drawer where presents or birthday cards are kept or next to a pile of thank-you letters which need to be written.

6) Pegged to a bag of museli. Or salad.

Of course, while you're smugly congratulating yourself for being able to hide a single Minstrel in a whole host of unlikely places simply by ensuring that you are a subservient wretch in your own version of Upstairs Downstairs, you must be equally sure where not to hide food. The fridge is a bad place, for a start.

No amount of inventive hiding, however, can disguise the fact that dieting is as fun as smashing your head repeatedly into the pavement while wearing a catsuit made of barbed wire.

It'd all be so much easier if scientists could help us eat more of the right foods by simply planting lies in our heads like in Inception but without the collapsing buildings and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Hang on, they can: researchers at the University of California planted false memories into the heads of dieters, connecting bad foods with bad memories.

They were told that analysis of their food preferences made it clear that strawberry ice-cream had made them sick when they were young – 41 per cent later said they'd be avoiding strawberry ice-cream.

Quite frankly, I don't think they can have been sufficiently committed to ice-cream in the first place. I mean, alcohol has made all of us as sick as dogs, but we've kept going back for more, haven't we?