Tonight, I will have my last supper. There will be no apostles gathered at the table, no water changing into wine (although wine certainly will be involved; I’ll just buy it from the liquor store rather than rely on divine intervention.) My supper will be a dinner for two and feature large portions of my favorite fattening fare – foods I’m not going to enjoy for a long, long time.

You see, in my household, “the last supper” is what we call the final meal consumed on the night before “Serious Diet Monday.” (As in “I’m starting a serious diet on Monday. Seriously!”)

You might say it’s a bit of a misnomer considering that I’ve enjoyed approximately 400 “last suppers” in my lifetime, followed by 400 “Serious Diet Mondays.” (That’s approximately one last supper and one “Serious Diet Monday” per month for the last 30 years.) Obviously, I’m taking license.

But, hey, it’s MY ritual; I’m entitled!

I’ve found that having a “last supper” is a critical first step for any serious attempt at weight loss. One must have a final blowout – a personal Fat Tuesday, if you will (although most last suppers typically occur on Sunday nights) – in order to get a head start on the dieting process.

The idea is to indulge in a meal so big, so rich and so heavy that when you wake up on Monday morning, you will feel nary a pang of hunger. In fact, if you plan the last supper properly, you’ll want for nothing until 7 in the evening the next day. At that point, you will have dieted for an entire 12 hours and be all the more motivated to succeed!

But what to HAVE for the last supper? That is the question!

I tend to approach it from two angles:

1) Depending on the particular diet I’m choosing for “Serious Diet Monday,” I give weighty consideration to foods that are on that program’s “forbidden” list. Tomorrow, for instance, I’m starting a food-combining program that allows selected complex carbs only in the morning and restricts breads, pastas, sugars, potatoes and the like completely. Therefore, my verboten list includes Italian and Thai cuisine plus sushi, Mexican, barbecue, Greek, Chinese and, of course, anything served from a drive-through window.

2) Since the last supper is usually consumed at a restaurant, I think about the quality of the chef and calculate the odds that my last meal will be cooked to perfection. (Believe me, you DON’T want your last supper to be a disappointment to your taste buds. This could be disastrous, possibly postponing “Serious Diet Monday” for a full week! “I can’t start a serious diet tomorrow! My last supper was inedible!”)

As essential as it is to adequately prepare for this all-important meal, one should be aware that, in the end, it all boils down to culinary whim. You can plan a lavish Italian feast of lasagna, garlic bread, salad greens with gorgonzola dressing, followed by a luscious tiramisu. But when 6 o’clock rolls around and you’re craving Thai, then you’ve got to go for the Thai. Those are the “last supper” rules.

I cannot emphasize enough what a difficult decision this is.

My husband always says, “Relax. It’s not like this is your execution meal. That’s REALLY the last supper!”

He’s right, of course. I spend WAY too much time, as it is, thinking about what my execution meal would consist of (which is ironic given my unblemished permanent record and “preferred driver’s” status). I often wonder how much choice one really has their last night on death row. Can you order out from, say, Antoine’s in the French Quarter? Will they deliver to a tiny cell in Leavenworth? And if your Trout Pontchartrain arrives undercooked, can you send it back? I worry about these things.

I decide not to sweat it. After all, tonight’s meal isn’t really THE last supper. It’s yet another meal before yet another diet begins. So what if Last Supper No. 401 isn’t as satisfying as, say, Last Supper No. 355 (which, as I recall, was a gastronomic triumph with a Northern Italian theme). There will be another one in a month.

In the meantime, I’m thinking Mexican might be the way to go tonight.