How am I supposed to diet under these conditions?

Being a mother involves serious will power sometimes.

No sooner have the kids polished off the mountain of selection boxes they got at Christmas than you’re hit with a dieter’s worst nightmare: Easter.

It’s admittedly my own fault that I chose now to try and lose a few pounds, when there’s so much chocolate in the fridge I feel like I’m having an affair with Willy Wonka. But, when you’ve got three kids and dozens of relatives, the sheer number of eggs they receive is insane. I only have to look at them to feel light headed.

I think this is partly because, when my generation were children, Easter eggs were a bona fide luxury item – something that felt genuinely expensive and usually were. Now, you can get two for less than a fiver when they’re on offer in the supermarket.

And why wouldn’t you? There is something undeniably better about the taste of chocolate when moulded into the shape of an egg. I have no idea why – it can’t just be psychological, surely – but they’re impossible to resist.

The observant among you might have noticed a contradiction here: surely having lots of chocolate around shouldn’t be a problem when none of it belongs to ME.

Technically it wouldn’t, if I was a better mother than I am, the kind who wouldn’t dream of swiping a chunk of Galaxy egg every time I opened the fridge for a miserable Weight Watchers yoghurt.

Besides, thanks to the healthy eating messages I’ve bombarded my kids with since the day they were born, they are torturously slow when it comes to eating them.

How I can have produced three children who are actually restrained in these circumstances – the kind who cease demolishing the chocolate because they’re full – is baffling.

It would never have happened in my day. When you were eating an Easter egg, there was no reason to stop unless you were on the verge of some sort of glycaemic fit.

The only question now is what the best approach is to dealing with this torture. A. Make them stash their bounty of eggs in their rooms, where they risk being left in some unlikely hiding place such as under the mattress only to be discovered on a hot day?

B. Risk severe unpopularity and gaining a dress size by ‘helping them out’.

C. Undergo hypnotherapy to get me through the next few weeks.

I could of course just pull myself together and leave the eggs for the people they were intended for. But, come on. I’m not a machine.