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I am officially resigning my membership in the Clean Plate Club. Actually I realized awhile ago that cleaning my plate was no longer going to be an option if I wanted to control my weight.

Why? Because in any given week, on any given day, during any given meal even, I am confronted by an awful lot of food. Seriously good food. And while I'm not making excuses, sometimes it's damn hard to resist finishing something that turns out to be extremely tasty.

So the key for me is not cleaning my plate. This week I realized that even leaving a bite or two is a step in the right direction.

Consider the following:

I had lunch with my brother at the new New York pizzeria Pulino's on Tuesday. We ordered two of Pulino's thin-crust ("bowling alley pizza," the chef Nate Appleman called them) pizzas and a salad. There were two slices of pizza left at the end of the meal. When our server was about to clear them, she asked, "don't you want to finish those?" "I do,' I replied. "But I'm not going to." And just like that they were gone.

At lunch with a friend at the very good New York Italian restaurant Alto the chef sent out a pasta course for the two of us—two phenomenal filled pastas. one with beef and one with salt cod. We had one of each and left the rest. Those delicate, delicious suckers were hard to leave. But we did.

Dinner on Thursday was leftover Cuban Chinese food. I had one of the fried sweet plaintains and left the rest.

Weigh-in

Leaving food doesn't solve all of my eating issues, but I hope it's a step in the right direction. Let's see if it helped this week. 223. Down a pound from last week. Clean plates be damned.