I should have started writing this two weeks ago

Around three years ago the lithium batteries in my scale died. This was not really a problem to me. After all, lithium batteries seem just so hard to find and replace. They aren't, but the fact that they aren't long cylinders like the others somehow convinced me that they are. As a result of this mental block and my own laziness, I never bothered to replace them and so my scale just sat in the corner of my bathroom unused collecting dust and, as things are wont to do in bathrooms populated by people with body hair, collecting stray follicles.

It looked disgusting.

Beyond looking disgusting, though, it also allowed me to loosen the strings and get lazy. Weight is not an easy thing for me -- not easy to think about nor easy to maintain. In fact, three years ago I simply accepted that this would be a battle I was fated to fight for the rest of my life, a struggle to keep those three numbers in a somewhat reasonable range. This is easier said than done in most cases, and as I had no way or reason or bother to check those numbers on a daily basis I got lazy and the battle started to be lost. Considering I already had weighed more than I wanted to, this was a bad thing. In college I had weighed as little as 167 and spent most of my time in undergrad around 170. I didn't overeat, I exercised daily and while my diet still wasn't great, it wasn't horrendous either.

By the end of college I had creeped up to 190, a result of spending every night at the newspaper office and having a girlfriend who worked at Coldstone Creamery, though she is hardly to blame for my own lack of self control. I always had it in my mind to get back to 170 "one of these days" but I never really put the pedal to the metal and as long as I weighed myself regularly, I didn't go above 190 too strongly in one direction or the other. Until the batteries in my scale died, anyway.

In the three years since I paid no bother to checking my weight, I enjoyed the social aspects of being in my mid-20s and, well, beer tastes good. Really good. So over time as the pounds started to creep up and I reluctantly acknowledged that I'd need to go one notch looser on my belt, I always assumed that I'd simply lose the weight at some point and failed to notice that I was starting to lose the battle again. I had grown lazy, larger and in some ways, physically, a little unseemly for my taste.

After hosting some friends for dinner a few weeks ago, more than one of them made light of the disgusting scale in the corner of the bathroom and I started to realize that I was just like that scale, left to become disused and accrue unappealing physical characteristics. I am probably being too hard on myself. I'm not an ugly man -- I don't think anyway -- but in my mind I saw a clear parallel between that scale left unmaintained and my own body.

It was time for a change. I had been leaning in this direction after I stepped on a friend's scale in Chicago a few weeks earlier and was downright horrified by what I saw. The number rang up at 220. This was only compounded by seeing a photograph of us together in our college years and seeing how noticeably thinner I looked. Now, three weeks later, it was clearly time to get on the horse and fix the issue. The scale was cleaned, I made the arduous walk to the convenience store on the ground floor of my building to buy new lithium batteries and I set out on a plan.

See, this wouldn't be the first time I'd be waging a battle against my own stomach. I had grown up morbidly obese in my early teen years, rarely exercising except for when I played football for three months out of the year (and "played" is a loose term) and eating about as poorly as one can. Meals involving mozzerella sticks, cheese fries, cheeseburgers and a milk shake or multiple glasses of soda were not unheard of. Meals involving anything green were virtually nonexistent. It was, in no uncertain terms, not the proper diet for someone in their adolescence.

I ballooned and ballooned and kept relying on the trump card in my pocket that, as everyone had told me, once puberty came I would stretch out like everyone does. The only issue with that is if I kept assuming the human maturation process would take care of weight I wouldn't bother to do a thing about it on my own. By the time I had reached 16 I had noticed a few things: I could and had grown a full beard, so puberty was essentially over, I had never kissed a girl and at the height of approximately 5'8" I was a very unmuscular 268 pounds. This was not healthy, and these were all related.

So I set a regimen. No appetizers. No sides. No soda. Walking and jogging on the treadmill for an hour every day. I was lucky that at that age I didn't have the distraction of beer to hinder me and slowly but surely the pounds came off. In the meantime I decided to start keeping track of my weight privately, which I did in a composition notebook along with my food intake and my exercise and, on one day, a memorial for George Harrison. But strangely, and perhaps most importantly, I decided to begin tracking my weight publicly as well. Using AOL Instant Messenger, which was all the rage for high schoolers in the pre-g-chat days of the early 2000s, I kept a public register in my personal profile updated daily with my weight and what I had hoped to be, 175 pounds by graduation day.

I didn't make it. The day I graduated from high school I weighed 182 pounds, seven shy of the goal. But having come so far, it was hard to view it as a failure. After all, I had lost some 70 pounds in just seven months (football season that fall had already dropped me to 252), and that is progress people often dream of in weight loss. But one constant throughout the process, which I had never expected, was that given how public I was making my weight, people started asking me about it. Daily.

For many this might be embarrassing. I was a little embarrassed myself. But after a while I realized something strange that I hadn't counted on. At first this weight-loss process was supposed to be something personal -- something selfish. But suddenly everyone wanted to know how it was going and everyone had an investment. In a sense I felt beholden to the rest of my high school graduating class; I was socially responsible to them for making sure I kept losing weight and getting in shape. And sure enough it worked.

As I jump on the venture again, I've decided that the best motivator for me will be, once again, to have my friends nagging and asking me where my weight is on the regular. I call it a "Crowd-Sourced Weight-Loss Plan," an attempt to draw public attention to my weight so that my friends -- and as I've discovered, officemates -- will hold me accountable. I decided to start this exactly 210 days before my sister's wedding, in hopes that over the course of those 30 weeks, I will lose 45 pounds and return to the healthier, or at least more handsome weight of 175 in time for all of the inevitable photographs. Every day I have posted my weight on Facebook and demanded that my friends do the socially responsible thing and follow the rules I've laid out for the process.

1) Less week-night drinking, no more than one drink any given week night. Remind me of this if you're out with me.
2) When you talk to me, ask me if I've exercised today and ask me what my weight is.
3) GET ON MY CASE ABOUT IT.

I'm probably the first person ever to willfully ask for overt peer-pressure in pursuit of a goal, but it is most certainly for the greater good. In here I will periodically update how the process has gone and the amusing or emotional observations I make along the way. More than anything else, however, I just hope the pounds keep coming off. And as I keep crowd-sourcing and inviting more attention and more scrutiny, it just might pay off by June.

If my friends read this and continue to pester me, at least that's a start. We'll see if this time around it's good enough to get me to the end.

CROWD-SOURCED WEIGHT LOSS PLAN Day 16!

Days until wedding: 196
Target weight: 175
Starting weight: 219
Weight today: 211