It’s what we expected to be the case all along but hoped not to be true. Scientists have now found cold hard proof that dieting makes you fat. Brain scans revealed that dieting and cutting calories decreases the hormones in the body that suppress appetite – the peptide YY, if you must know, and increase the level of hormones that make you hungry – the evil gremlin known as ghrelin, which is the hormone responsible for making us scoff whole family-sized chocolate bars in one go.

They also revealed that losing weight makes you crave more food and develop obsessive thinking patterns around eating… Tell us something we didn’t know…

Add to that that humans have as many fat-storing cells as a polar bear – yes, a creature than lives in sub-zero temperatures and can go without eating for six months, living in a freezing cave – and you have to ask, what hope have we got?

I really shouldn't have had that last penguin….

Not sure our office chairs offer the same levels of physical adversity. Our mechanisms in place to prevent loss are ultra-efficient; our mechanisms to lose weight are weak.

Anyway, the depressing upshot is, we are destined to be fatties. And if you lose any weight, you’ll only pile it back on again – so you may as well not bother.

That is genuinely the conclusion of the study, from the University of Melbourne, as interpreted by the Daily Mail.

Thanks scientists, very useful. We’ll do the same for you one day. In fact, that lab coat doesn’t go with those glasses. So there.