Brain food: how to stick to your New Year resolutions

If Harold Wilson reckoned a week was a long time in politics, he should have tried 12 days of keeping a resolution. Twelve days of nothing stronger than Tizer, of Pilates classes with their creepy pseudo-ethnic music, of penitently forking your way through a few leaves for a bleak winter supper. No wonder that fewer than a quarter of people asked in a University of Hertfordshire study last month actually stuck to their resolutions. But for those still battling your fleshly appetites, behavioural scientists have a recommendation: seek public humiliation. Look at the Twitter feed of Drew Magary . Comedy writer and "tender lover", Magary is also an "intense overeater" who last month tweeted: "I have to lose 50 pounds to get my back healthy. No joke. From now on, every day, I will tweet my weight to chart my progress." Which he does, along with other sufferers, on the #twitterpublichumiliationdiet hashtag. Magary reports good days ("Weigh-in: 241.8lbs. I skipped right over you, 242.) and bad ("Turns out that snorting M&Ms is just as bad for you as eating them"). Navel-gazing, you might call it, but the point is that Megary has made a public commitment; if he deviates from it, his family and friends have licence to nag. There's a lot of web-based humiliation in this resolution season, from Facebook updates to sites such as wereindebt.com run by a blogger – "early 30s with a big mortgage" – as a diary of "my journey to financial freedom". To be most effective, though, a humiliation strategy should involve partners and colleagues – people who won't just ping over a chiding e-mail, but will shout and embarrass you. Or you can combine social pressure with financial incentives: Ed Vaizey, the Tory spokesman on culture, plans to lose 40lb by his 42nd birthday. Failure to meet a weekly target means a £50 forfeit to his wife. It's a classic Nudge of the sort favoured by the "new Tories"; not only does Vaizey slim back into his jeans, he demonstrates his Cameroonian credentials.