“What do you fancy for tea?”

“I’m not sure,” said Shana. “To be honest, I don’t really feel like having a big meal today.”

I knew having tea and biscuits (three malted milk — each) this late in the afternoon had been a mistake, but it was too late now: they were already dunked.

“Well, maybe we should have a small meal instead,” I said. “In fact, while we’re about it we could completely change our eating habits. Instead of sticking to the traditional ‘three meals a day’ routine, we could eat ‘little and often’ instead.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Shana.

“Even better than little and often,” I said, pandering to our inner gourmands, “would be little and very often!”

“Now you’re talking!” said Shana.

“This new eating regime will have an extra advantage,” I said. “More meals means more trips to the kitchen to prepare food, and more trips to the kitchen means we’ll be getting…”

“More exercise!” exclaimed Shana.

“Yes. And if we’re exercising more we might lose some of that Quality Street weight.”*

In my imagination, I could already see great things happening. We would both become leaner and fitter, burning off hundreds of calories merely by running to and from the kitchen dozens of times a day to make tiny snacks.

It was too easy, too good to be true, I thought. Somewhere, there’s gotta be a catch.

And then I spotted the downside to our plan.

“Unfortunately, too many of those food-prep trips to the kitchen could mean we’d lose too much weight. Paradoxically, we might find ourselves wasting away because of eating too much food.”

“I don’t think that would happen,” said Shana. “After tearing round the house all day, we’d need to put our feet up and settle down with a big plate of chip butties.”

Thus spake the Voice of Reason, I thought.

Meanwhile, all this talk of food had made both of us hungry, so I dashed off to the kitchen to make us a couple of small cucumber sandwiches.**

* The weight you still haven’t quite managed to work off after having half a tin of toffees two Christmases ago.
** And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything!