Cabbage soup diet

Crash diets are of course suspect, but the measure of success in any diet is not how much weight you take off or how quickly but how well you keep it off. We were encouraged to try a second round of the cabbage soup diet because we successfully kept off the 10 lbs. we lost in the round last summer.

So this time, from March 1 to 7, I once again lost about 10 lbs -- in fact, the total for the two rounds is 21 lbs -- and that feels great.

I got the feeling sometimes during the past week that the only reason cabbage is used is to keep you from eating too much of anything, because you can only force so much of that down. We did our best with alternate versions of the soup -- adding fennel and basil to make it more "Italian," using stock instead of water -- but in the end you're stuck with a bland soup that is just bubble and squeak without the potatoes.

It is the baked potato day and the two steak days that save it. I think we will try another form of dieting the next time around, but you have to give the devil its due -- this diet is effective.