SUGAR PACKED INTO A FANCY WRAPPER

"No Mars Bar today?" asked Nathalie behind the counter. I smiled and said no, while she scanned my card.

"Ah well," she said, "Maybe you'll be back later."

"There's no telling!" I laughed.

Yesterday, we'd headed over there at 3:30pm. You might remember that I was using Mars Bars to practice self-control: buy one (from Nathalie in the café), leave it on my desk for a while, and try not to eat it.

It occurs to me now though, that so far, I've eaten every single one. And yesterday's had disappeared by 4pm! Nathalie seems to have me clocked.

So today, I decided to look up how much exercise I need, to burn off the calories from a single Mars Bar. This is the post-holiday thing now isn't it? Take the stairs instead of the lift, step away from the cake, get back to the gym, stop eating Mars Bars, etc.

Well. I did get back to the gym. It was bone-creakingly difficult. And I did follow the posters and use the stairs instead of the lift. And I did work out how much cardio you need to burn off a 45g chocolate bar...

25 minutes on the rowing machine.

Maybe more actually - but at least that! A minimum! Twenty five whole minutes! That seems like a lot of rowing for something that's so easy to eat. At my speed, that's about 4km. 4,000 metres, puffing and stretching and feeling sick, for 40 seconds of chocolatey, gooey, sticky, melty-in-the-mouthy caramel goodness.

Why can't life be the other way around? Why can't burning off the calories be easy, and putting them back on, super-difficult? Why can't we enjoy the delicious things in life without having to make ourselves ache and sweat for an hour to pay for them?

Actually, the more I think it through, the more I think I know the reason: it's because if that were the case, we'd all give ourselves licence to stuff ourselves with more; it's human nature. And then we'd be in exactly the same situation anyway (bigger input than output) and actually, given that a lot of processed food is just sugar packed into a fancy wrapper, it's possible that we've already done exactly that! It's possible that Mars Bars are already the super-indulgent waistline time-bomb of the First World. Capitalism eh?

I'd have been craving bananas probably, if I didn't quite know what a Mars Bar was.

So, cardio it is. And fewer Mars Bars! It might have occurred to you (as it's only today occurred to me) that buying one in the first place was the real bit where my lack-of-self-control let me down. Wisdom can be a tiny course correction, long before you have to yank the wheel round.

I really am slow at recognising some things.