I prefer to defy the diet gods and continue to starve myself a little on Thursdays.

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

As I have been doing fairly often recently, I am starting to write my Serious Diet column on Thursday. And if it's Thursday, chances are I am going to bed hungry because I have markedly decreased my food intake all day in anticipation of getting on the scale tomorrow morning and weighing myself for all the serious eaters to see.

Now you don't have to be a dieting expert to know that in general, starving yourself one day a week is probably not the best way for anybody and everybody to lose weight. But I also know that for at least one serious eater, namely me, drastically curtailing my eating on Thursday has really helped in my quest to lose weight.

And given the alternatives, which for me would probably involve throwing in the towel and pulling the plug on my Serious Diet posts, I prefer to defy the diet gods and continue to starve myself on Thursdays. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Consider this week, which in many ways represents a typical eating scenario for me.

I am still recovering from my Texas trip, which really did feature many, many, wonderful things to eat (thank you, Robb Walsh).

I walked into the office on Monday morning to find three fine examples of North Carolina barbecue, courtesy of Alaina, who had done the heavy lifting for the SE team over the weekend by embarking on a cross-North Carolina barbecue trip for our book. Besides the barbecue, Alaina also brought back a big bag of her mother's incomparable peanut brittle and a few other native North Carolina sweets to round out our NC barbecue meal.

That amazing barbecue and the equally amazing peanut brittle lingered for three days. Also this past week, to prepare for a television interview in which I have to talk knowledgeably about a dozen New York restaurants, Carey brought in a selection of hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, and onion rings from Bark, a newish Brooklyn hot dog emporium.

And just to complete this serious diet-busting trifecta, on Tuesday evening I went to a dinner hosted by a friend at one of my favorite restaurants in New York City, Locanda Verde. Said dinner consisted of the kitchen sending a seemingly endless parade of its best dishes to our table. Lamb sliders, anyone?

So is it any wonder that when Thursday rolled around, I rolled into SE world headquarters and announced it was going to be a cereal supper kind of day. And I pretty much stuck to my limited eating regimen even when confronted with two more hot dogs to be tasted for research purposes.

So for me, I just accept the fact that as long as I continue to semi-publicly diet by getting on the scale on Friday mornings and writing about it, I'm going to be markedly curtailing my eating on Thursday. It may not work for everyone, and it may not even work for me this week, but all I know is that I've lost 45 pounds since I started my diet, and that's not too bad.

Yes, I have backslid some in the past six months, and I intend to return to that lower weight hallowed ground, but I'm still way ahead of the game overall, and that's all that counts for me.

The Weigh-In

That said, I am not particularly optimistic about how Thinner is going to treat me this morning. Interim weigh-ins have not been promising this week.

But you know what? It doesn't really matter, because next week I'm going to get back on the Thinner horse once again on Friday morning. And even if I have to starve myself on Thursdays to screw up my courage to do it, that's OK, for this one serious eater at least.

Here goes: 224. Up a pound from last week. The Texas Effect lingers, like the volcanic ash over Northern European airspace. Next Thursday can't come soon enough for me.