Answer me honestly, ladies. Would you rather be clever or thin?

Personally, I'd settle for either, but that's not the point of this exercise. You have to choose between the two options, and if you're struggling, take a quick look at the girls in Scooby Doo.

Don't try to tell me you'd rather understand the Hang Seng than the Glycaemic Index. The odds are you're lying through the teeth you've just had wired shut.

According to the latest research, 95 per cent of females would sooner step confidently into a pair of size eight jeans than step confidently up to the Mastermind hot seat.

In fact, says this survey, more than half of us would rather be thin than rich. It also claims that a third of women spend more time worrying about their weight than they do about their finances or their job; a third have lied to their friends about how much they weigh, and one in four of us have dropped a dress size without the Special K diet, just by telling our partners that of course we wear a 12.

Maybe there's nothing strictly new in this; I seem to remember the Duchess of Windsor said you can't be too rich or too thin.

One look at the Duchess suggests she was wrong on both counts, but that doesn't stop a lot of women from seeing things pretty much like she did, decades after she checked in to the great health spa in the sky.

Perhaps that's why the gym was packed to the rafters on Monday morning. I'd reckoned on having the place pretty much to myself at 10am, when the pre-work rush should have passed.

But the car park was chocker and I had no option other than to pull in next to the Mercedes convertible whose svelte, groomed, blonde driver was sashaying into the reception in the sort of designer sportswear that doesn't come in my size.

Finding a darkened corner of the changing-room was no easier - the blonde appeared to have cloned herself and placed her identical sisters at strategic points throughout the entire space, so that wherever I plonked my gym bag I'd be getting changed next to some vision in Juicy Couture, with plenty of mirrors around to point up the contrast for me.

So much for exercise elevating the mood, I said grumpily to the other half when I got back home. "Well, it's Monday," he said. "Of course the gym will be packed - it's people trying to undo all the harm they did at the weekend."

Maybe he had a point. The weekend's excesses were certainly on my mind, especially that second bottle of fizz to celebrate/obliterate yet another birthday.

I couldn't see that the blonde had done that much damage to herself, but perhaps she was racked with guilt over the amount of dressing she'd allowed on her lettuce leaf blow-out. These things are relative, I suppose.

No. Given the angst we already suffer over our imperfections, why would women want even more brain cells to focus on our weight gain? We'd be better off not worrying our pretty little heads about it.

Personally, I'm waiting for the perfect cosmetic surgery option - the one in which the surgeons suck out all your excess fat, use it to fill up all your wrinkles and convert what's left to extra grey matter that has been genetically modified to think like a man.

Just imagine, girls - you'd never have to worry about your weight again. Only one vital statistic would give you sleepless nights - but that's another story.

Updated: 08:53 Wednesday, January 11, 2006