On a sunny afternoon not long ago, I visited Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center, the super-glossy Manhattan mall with the super-fancy food court, including Per Se, where I had probably logged 200 courses and a few kilos of foie gras over time, and Masa, where I had downed osetra caviar as if it were Orville Redenbacher popcorn.

This was a lesser, lower-pressure meal: a carafe of a French rosé to my right, a wedge of quiche Florentine to my left, and between them, a chicken-salad sandwich, creamy with mayonnaise and crunchy with pressed bread. To the untrained eye, I was a man of leisure indulging in a leisurely, heedless late lunch or early supper.

But oh, no. I was working. And I had many, many calories to go before I slept. I left Bouchon around 4:30 p.m., right after a friend and I took care of the last crumbs of a gigantic haute "Nutter Butter" cookie, which resembled a pale orange Frisbee, only tastier and no doubt sculpted with at least half a stick of butter.

Around 7:30 p.m. I waddled into Megu Midtown, a new Japanese restaurant in the Trump World Tower near the United Nations. I figured on some kanpachi sushi, some hamachi sashimi, but the menu didn't end there. It went on for pages, and I couldn't claim due diligence if I didn't try the cubes of grass-fed lamb, cooked over binchotan charcoal. And the hefty wedge of Spanish mackerel with an emerald sauce that looked harmless but tasted suspiciously oily and cheesy. And, come dessert, skewers with chocolate bon-bons, which I washed down with the last of three glasses of a white rioja. OK, I'll admit it: four glasses. I love white riojas, and they go well with mackerel. I swear they do.

For more than two years now, this has been my life—the life of a restaurant critic, of someone whose pig-outs aren't failures of willpower but triumphs of professionalism. Actually, the pig-outs are just half of my life. The other half is prevention and penance, by which I mean Pilates and free weights, treadmills and elliptical machines.