Tailgating is great, but it is not your friend

Last weekend I decided to make one of the many trips I do annually to see some professional sports team I've never seen before. Anyone who is reading this blog is probably already familiar with it, but as I headed down I-95 to visit friends in Washington, D.C. and then see my Giants get the fucking shit kicked out of them in Baltimore, it hadn't occured to me that weight-loss on a vacation -- even one that lasts all of 60 hours -- is astonishingly difficult. As soon as I arrived I was completely out of my element and out of my routine as far as regular exercise and watching my diet goes. At one point, I actually offered to cook dinner for my friend Lindsay and her brother so I could ensure that whatever I was eating wasn't awful for me.

For whatever reason I was not taken up on this offer. Oh well.

The tragedy of all of this is that right before leaving for the trip last Friday I had worked my way down to an impressive new low in my hunt for that magical number of 175. On Thursday afternoon following a round of jogging and swimming I had dropped down to 206.6 pounds, the lowest I had been in, well, I have no idea since I didn't have a functioning scale for the last three years. The point is that I had made progress. Precious, precious progress. But one meal at DuPont Circle eatery BGR and an impossible to ignore BBQ pulled pork mac-n-cheese at Noodles and Company and suddenly extensive damage had been done, even if I tried my best to keep the diet reined in by having an extremely mediocre sub-600 calorie Moroccan chicken dish at Gordon Biersch Saturday night.

This was already a weekend doomed to ruin me as the previous paragraph suggests, and in the midst of it all I only managed to get one 45-minute stretch of exercise squeezed in. And then the tailgate happened. Now this wasn't as bad as your standard tailgate before a football game considering we had no grill at our disposal, but that didn't exactly make our chosen spread a healthy option either. After our initial tailgate plans had fallen through, Lindsay and I hastily went to a supermarket and bought loads of cold cuts, rolls, cookies, potato chips and a remarkably potent new brand of Doritos Lindsay's brother Robert suggested. And since this was a tailgate, of course there was a bundle of Yeungling and Blue Moon to help numb the eventual pain of the football game.

Let's just recap all of this: eating like this is not good regardless of whether or not you're trying to lose weight. Eating like this when you're trying to lose weight is definitely not good at all.


So where did this all leave us?

Well, suffice it to say the impressive progress I had made in getting down to 206.6 was completely wiped out, and repairing the damage took a surprisingly long amount of time. In fact, as I now stand seven days after the tailgate I have just finally gotten back down to where I was before the trip (lower actually), which is impressive considering I came back with enough salt and water weight to have me pushing the scales at 212. All of it was quite the drag, but hey, at least I did get a photo of me in front of the Washington Monument that looks like I'm looking out over a post-apocalyptic hellscape. So that's cool.

In any event, I'm fortunate in that I won't be making another one of these trips for about three months or so, but in the interim, with this jaunt and the holidays behind me, it's time to do some serious cracking down, which I will be starting by eating some General Tso's Chicken whenever my Chinese food delivery finally arrives.

I know, it looks like I'm taking this really seriously. Whatever, I hit a new low today. I'm splurging tonight. Only tonight, though. The clock is ticking.


CROWD-SOURCED WEIGHT LOSS PLAN Day 37!

Days until wedding: 175
Target weight: 175
Starting weight: 219
Weight today: 205.8