We're entering the home stretch, and it will not be easy

I love my family. Most people love their families. But most people can also understand the complexity of family overload. I know I do. Strangely, though, for me "overload" isn't really so much about the quality time of finding out from each of your family members that they have some girl they want you to meet -- though that is its own special kind of overload. No this is about food.

And in my family, you get overloaded with food almost every time you see them.

That's fine. As my grandmother has put it, if you're going to go out to eat, you may as well eat well, and if the discomfort I felt wearing all of my old pants over the last five years is any indication, I agree with the sentiment. However, there is one positively brutal stretch of the year that includes so many family gatherings it makes people's fears about gaining weight during late December seem like child's play. Every year from mid-March until Mid-May if you try and fail to make plans with me on a weekend it's a good bet it's because my family has taken me hostage, and I'm busy consuming all of the food that comes with it. To wit, all of these fall within a span of roughly eight weeks:

My uncle's birthday
Passover
My mother's birthday
My father's birthday
Mother's Day
My step-mother's birthday (which this year is the same day as Mother's Day)

I should note that this stretch also includes two cousins birthdays and has in the past included the birthday of more than one person I have dated, fortunately for me though, both of those cousins do not live in New York and I'm no longer dating any of those women, which eases up the docket a little bit. The long and short of this, however, is that over this period there is a lot of eating. And my family has never been one for the light crackers and cheese hors d'oeurves, either. When we barbecue we serve diced up sausage and skirt steak before you've walked in the door, let alone sat down for an appetizer. This is made even more complicated by the fact that my mother, father, step-mother and sister-in-law all happen to be tremendous cooks, so generally speaking, even if you're full, you don't want that brisket at the passover seder to go to waste.

And let us not forget that some of these occasions call for restaurants rather than home-cooking, where the portions may be limited in size, but they certainly aren't in number -- or sodium and fat content for that matter.

Add it all up and this makes it a pretty big obstacle when you're just oh-so-close to getting to that next Chipotle burrito bowl. But faux-Mexican rewards aside, this is even trickier when you've finally hit the stretch run of your weight-loss quest. Yes, if you've been following the calender closely, you'll see there are a mere 68 days until my sister gets married and I, should all things go according to plan, will be at a trim 175 pounds or lower on the big day. This past Saturday marked exactly 10 weeks until the deadline and exactly 2/3 of the time from when I began trying to lose weight to when I expect to finish. At the time I was more than 2/3 of the way to my goal, weighing in at a very low 183.8 pounds.

But what do you do when the home stretch coincides with the heaviest eating stretch of the year?

Niche, Kant, the Amazing Kreskin, James Tiberius Kirk, Ian Malcolm -- none of these great philosophers, seers or thinkers of our past have a satisfactory answer to this age-old question, and perhaps only Malcolm's delving into chaos theory has come even remotely close. But surely I can't be expected to simply not eat the delicious food prepared for or served to me when the family gathers. After all, I wouldn't want to insult anyone, and I certainly didn't want to insult anyone at my mother's birthday dinner this past weekend when the amount of food consumed at Molyvos was positively silly. (Side note: If you go there, don't get the lamb shank like me. Get the pork chop. And definitely get the grilled octopus appetizer.)

This is the delicate balance I must find a way to strike.

Whether or not to indulge for a parade of celebrations when I'm trying to lose weight is a difficult enough task on its own -- and this year it gets even dicier considering I will be at a wedding in North Carolina this May where they, too, know how to eat. Add in the fact that being so close to what should be my normal body weight makes it more difficult to trim pounds and we've arrived at quite the conundrum. Just this weekend alone I saw my weight go from a hair beneath 184 pounds back over 189.

That drastic short-term weight gain is, of course, not really real weight gain. Once I've exercised for a few days to work out the excess water and salt running through my system I'll be back down to a more reasonable range. But if I'm not careful it very well might become real weight gain. Even if it doesn't, the fact remains that I have roughly 10 pounds or so to lose in 68 days, and with several more celebratory occasions on the horizon I may be going through this a few more times. All of that spells trouble, and a need to exercise some true discipline when I'm not celebrating someone's birthday or wedding.

What it really means, though, most significantly, is that if I do end up getting to 175 pounds, well god damnit, I'll have earned that Quesarito.

CROWD-SOURCED WEIGHT LOSS PLAN DAY 142!

Days until sister's wedding: 68
Target weight: 175
Starting weight: 219
Weight today: 187.4