I did not lose 17 pounds in a week on the banana diet as promised. And I was faithful.

Well, mostly.

Donna Fielder

As faithful as a woman involuntarily confined to fruits and vegetables can be. I even made the cabbage soup you’re supposed to slurp every time you make a wrong turn into a Sonic Drive-In slot.

I did lose 6 pounds, but that doesn’t seem like a lot when you consider that my dog started sleeping on the couch because my stomach growls kept him awake.

My daughter agreed to go on the diet with me. And if you agree with her that having a giant bowl of peach cobbler was legal on fruit day, then she stuck with it too.

The details are a little fuzzy, but here’s what I remember about the week:

Sunday: I shopped. And my wallet lost weight. Starving isn’t cheap, you know. I browsed the healthy aisles and realized I could be eating chicken-fried steak for the cost of a mango.

There are lots of things today that I don’t recognize and wouldn’t know which part to eat and which part to throw away. When I was a kid, the only vegetable Mom cooked was green beans.

Maybe they invented the rest of this stuff after I left home.

Monday: Grape juice for breakfast and strawberries for lunch. A massive headache by mid-afternoon. Kiwi and watermelon for dinner.

Am I a waif yet?

Tuesday: Is an avocado a fruit or a vegetable? It didn’t matter. Despite the “ripe” sticker on the outside, the avocado was stony inside. I licked it a bit and gave up.

“I can prove that a tomato is a vegetable,” I announced to the newsroom. “See this bottle of V8? See what is in that picture right there on the front? A tomato. If you can’t trust the Campbell Soup Co. about vegetables, who can you trust?

Wednesday: I broke down and ate some cabbage soup. And to answer the questions of every single person who knew I was on the diet, no, the cabbage did not give me, uh, gastric difficulties.

Thursday: Banana day. I have heretofore failed to mention that every day of my diet, someone in the newsroom brought goodies. The goody desk is right on the way to my desk. I had been very strong. But on banana day, there were cupcakes. With icing.

“Don’t you think a cupcake with yellow icing is a lot like a banana?” I asked the room at large. Except for a snicker from somewhere in the back, there was silence. I walked on by the cupcakes.

“What is that smell?” I asked, my nose quivering like a pig’s snout over a vat of potato peels. “I smell food. Hot food.”

Amy Thompson hunkered over her plateful of something fragrant at her desk. “This isn’t good,” she said. “Really. I’d much rather have a banana.”

I e-mailed my daughter about mid-afternoon. “You sticking to bananas?” I wanted to know. Christi, the drama queen, wrote back:

“Oh Mom, I nearly fainted at my desk, and my boss made me eat a salad.”

I can see it now. Her supervisor forcing cheddar croutons past her pale, trembling lips.

I actually dreamed about a hamburger patty that night.

The next day, Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe brought me fresh figs. I’d never eaten them fresh before and had no idea they didn’t hang from the trees prewrapped in Newtons. They were delicious.

I attended a birthday party at a Mexican restaurant Friday evening and sat sipping a Diet Coke while everyone else munched chips and cheese sauce, and chocolate birthday cake.

For that alone, I should have lost 10 pounds. I think enchilada fumes plumped up my butt a bit.

I remained stalwart for hours on Saturday. I could have a slab of meat that night. All right. I’d cook mashed potatoes for a dinner guest and stick to the meat and a sprig of broccoli.

You can guess what happened next. Have you ever made creamy mashed potatoes — actually whipped them yourself with cream — then added butter and watched it melt and swirled up a little peak at the top?

You take ownership of potatoes like that. You are them. And they are you. They are a part of me now.

Mostly on my thighs.

And that’s the reason I didn’t lose 17 pounds on the banana diet.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.