Chipotle, Glorious Chipotle

Brown rice. Black beans. Chicken. Sour cream. Cheese. A pile of hot sauce. It's simple really, and yet it brings a surprising amount of joy into our lives. After a while, however, we develop a dependency. It's just too delicious, too quick, too filling, and too easy not to. But the hardest part, always, is accepting and admitting you have a problem.

But here I am. My name is David. And I am addicted to Chipotle.

I accept this as a battle I am going to be waging for the rest of my life, myself against the zesty high-quality faux Mexican that I first discovered a decade ago in Evanston, Illinois. I have no choice but to accept this fight. I have won minor battles along the way of course, changing ingredients here or there. When my addiction went into full swing my regular order was a feisty combination of white rice, a double scoop of pinto beans, a double order of barbacoa, sour cream, cheese (with a little more if you can spare it, sir) and a bag of chips. Take a gander at the Chipotle corporate website and you'll see their nutrition calculator conservatively estimates that at a scant 1,830 calories and 73.5 grams of fat. That's roughly 150 calories more than my current diet allows per day.

I realized long ago that this had to be reformed and over the years the order has changed. The chips have long since been dropped, as has the tortilla for the lighter and more easily mixed bowl option. Brown rice is now the norm instead of white, ditto black beans for pinto and chicken for barbacoa -- and single servings at that. The current order comes in at a significantly trimmer 690 calories and 30 grams of fat, numbers that, really, aren't quite so bad for you in the grand scheme of an average day, particularly since it leaves you with nearly 1,000 calories to spend on breakfast and dinner.

As a result of those changes my addiction is manageable, and not particularly threatening at that, which is good since before I decided to start losing weight my Chipotle intake was operating at a pretty steady rate of one meal per week. This is what happens when there's three locations within a three-block radius of your office. But I have also realized that my regular visits to Chipotle are not just a hindrance to reaching my goals when I could indulge in significantly less fatty fare such as, say, tilapia, but it's also a crutch, one that I lean on to get my fat kid fix every seven days.

Well, I had to find a way to make it into less of a crutch and more of a walking stick. And so I decided many weeks ago that Chipotle was no longer in the diet rotation along with various lean aquatic animals and leafy greens. Not unless I had earned it anyway.

Sometimes the world is just against you

Let's be frank here, people. The holidays are a very trying time when it comes to the subject of weight loss. Late December is a gorge of eating, then there's New Year's Eve, then there's New Year's, then there's the inevitable heavy drinking involved when Northwestern wins its first bowl game in 64 years (Ed: Go Cats.) and combined with all of this is the fact that it's just so damn cold outside and you start thinking and extra layer or two of cellulite might not be the worst thing in the winter months.

You fight through that shit.

You need to push yourself through the easy exits so you can actually make some progress in losing weight -- or at least keep yourself in check while you pound down loads of empty calories. Fortunately, while I haven't made much progress in getting the number on my scale lower through this most dangerous time of the year, I've managed to keep myself from going too overboard. However, now it's time to take a deep breath and focus. The holidays are over, I'm in the clear, and with the exception of my grandmother's birthday next weekend and the Super Bowl, there is nary an eating holiday in sight for me until late March, when I enter a brutal stretch in which my family and Judaism force me to endure about 87 food-heavy celebrations in seven weeks. Yes, Passover and the birthdays of my uncle, mother, father and step-mother all fall within close proximity, which means before those days hit I need to get some serious work done. We're talking "be in the 180s by mid-March" work.

I didn't think that would be too hard since I've made pretty solid progress over the first six weeks of this stupendous journey, but right as I walked into the gym on Jan. 2 to get my most pivotal period of weight-loss underwear I saw something on the door to the elliptical machine. It was that notice you see in the top right of this entry, a warning that if I should so much as dare to jump in the pool, I will not be allowed to for ten full days while it undergoes "annual routine maintenance."

Now that is some bullshit right there.