Weight for it — a simple (and maybe unscientific) way to lose pounds

Every time you walk past them without taking one — a custard-filled, chocolate-covered one, by way of illustration — you should lose incrementally more weight.

I would even go so far as to suggest that merely thinking about taking one — perhaps an apple fritter this time — without acting on this impulse should lead to a small weight loss.

It is so difficult to avoid temptation, especially at what has been the most tempting time of the year, that I also strongly believe that if you can successfully resist it for nearly the entire day you deserve a reward. Such as a doughnut.

It stands to reason that the longer you can go without eating one — or a cookie or a handful of spiced nuts — the more weight you should lose.

Therefore, there comes a time when you lose more weight by not eating a doughnut than you gain by eating it. I judge this time to be about five hours.

That is, if you come to your doughnut-laden place of employment at 9 a.m. and refrain from eating a doughnut until 2 p.m. or after, you end up with a net loss of weight. You lose more if you can wait until 3 p.m., and even more if you can hold out until 4 p.m.

It’s simple math. Presumably, you’d lose more weight still if you manage to wait until 5 p.m., but I’ve never actually made it that long.

The scientific principle behind this concept, incidentally, is the same one that makes crumbs calorie-free and causes leftovers to lead to weight loss because you aren’t wasting food.

I have been good. Truthfully, I have been avoiding doughnuts entirely, and (mostly) avoiding other sweets, except for some cookies and a chocolate salted-caramel tart and banana pudding and Mexican brownies and gingerbread brownies — and that was just today. Plus a Basque cheesecake, but not an entire one.

But despite all the avoidance, my weight has oddly not been going down. I take it that I am at that stage of weight loss referred to as plateau — after losing 10 pounds, I stay at the same weight for several weeks until it begins to go down again.

Oddly, this plateau began around Thanksgiving and I expect it to end now that the New Year is here. That’s probably a coincidence.

You have almost certainly seen that ubiquitous commercial (it’s still on the air, but seemingly less frequently than before) featuring an insanely happy woman singing and dancing about taking Jardiance — and then it turns out that it is a commercial about people making a commercial.

Jardiance is an enzyme-inhibiting anti-diabetes medication. The generic name for the drug is empagliflozin, but that’s not as easy to fit into a catchy tune. It makes you excrete more glucose than you ordinarily would, thus lowering the amount of sugar in your blood.

It’s kind of genius, when you think about it. But does it work any better than simply walking past a doughnut and not eating it?