I have to give a speech tonight in front of about 200 people

There are few moments in your life that you look back on and remember vividly, like your high school graduation or the first time you saw Star Wars in the theater. I'm no expert on these things -- I'm only 27 after all -- but I have to assume my sister's wedding qualifies as one of those moments. As for the ceremony itself, it will probably be like every other wedding, though my parents might be a smidge more emotional at this one than they would be at the other five weddings I'm attending this year. But even if the ceremony is the same kind of rote event every wedding is, when it's your family it's always a different sensation.

It's been 210 days since I first started publicly bugging the world about my weight issues, or at least my attempt to fix them. As I discussed recently I've had to confront and think about what, exactly, failure means to me because there was a very real chance I wasn't going to hit the threshold. I actually began telling people that perhaps 175 was too high a bar, because once I had cracked 180 the momentum grinded to a halt. Fortunately, however, over the final few days I managed to push through. This past Wednesday I, at long last, dipped below 175 and on Thursday and Friday I dipped below it further still.

That's all done now I'm sure. Last night was the rehearsal dinner for my sister's wedding, which involved a copious amount of wine, hors d'oeurves, dinner and cookies. I imagine most of that has thrown my numbers totally out of whack once again, and at the wedding tonight, I'm sure it will be more of the same.

But that's fine.

Of the numerous things I've learned about weight loss and about myself throughout this whole process, it's that you can't really trust the numbers. After all, they're just numbers. The important thing is about how you feel and if you've maintained the standards of your own sense of dedication and discipline. Considering I'm about to go jog and swim after writing this before it's even noon on a Saturday, I'd say I've done that. But I've also done things and learned things about myself that otherwise wouldn't have been possible, while transforming into a better (and by better don't mean more handsome, but more healthy) version of me.

Do or do not. There is no try.

What does it mean to fail? This is a question I've been pondering for the past few days as my weight-loss plan nears its terminus. See from the moment I set out to tackle this project it seemed I had always been ahead of the curve. Of the 45 pounds I set out to lose I was halfway there with nearly two-thirds of my planned weight-loss term to go. It seemed success was a fait accompli.

But as I noted many times, the closer you get to the end the tougher it gets. The ability to lose weight decreases exponentially when there's less of it to lose, or in mathematical terms, there is an asymptote as the limit on your presumed time of weight loss approaches infinity. In the case of weight loss, like drug addiction or a Rubik's cube, your job is never done, and you'll have to keep on working on it for the rest of your life no matter how close or comfortably settled in you are to that asymptote.

Now, I haven't opened a calculus textbook in 10 years, but the concept of a mathematical limit of a function has started to creep back into my consciousness, not because I suddenly feel as though I missed my calling as an astrophysicist, but because perhaps my body is reaching that asymptote. After all, my rate of weight-loss has declined steadily over the last two months or so and I've seemed almost terminally stuck between 175 and 182, struggling to get ever closer to the finish line while time continues to run low.

Just four days away from the end I have chipped away steadily, bit by bit, and I'm awfully close to getting there, but if I am for some reason unable to get through the last pound that stands in my way before this Saturday I'll have to wonder. It will be hard not to think about whether or not I should have had one fewer beer or if I shouldn't have consoled myself after the Blackhawks lost Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final last night by munching on some black pepper kettle chips.

I will have to ask myself two unsettling questions. Did I fail? Was it possible for me not to fail?

With ten days to go, it's time for the Final Countdown

Yesterday I stood at the front of the line in the Potbelly on the Rockefeller Center concourse and found they've recently added a new "BIGS" option to their menu, in which you can order a sandwich with 30% more meat. I know this was a recent addition to the menu because it didn't exist the last time I was in that Potbelly approximately 48 hours earlier.

I may have a problem.

I'm fine with that, though. Potbelly Sandwich works is a good combination of quality, cost and college-related nostalgia and does so with a relatively low number of calories. However, this "BIGS" option intrigued me. In my head I decided it was best to avoid it, but when I started to order this exchange occured:

Dave: "I'll have the roast beef on wheat with mushrooms."
Employee 1: "Would you like that BIG?"
Employee 2: "YEAH HE DOES!" (Saucy smirk that implies sexual intrigue, but is entirely about the sandwich.)
Dave: "No, I think I'll pass unfortunately."
Employee 2: "Oh come on, you know want the BIG one."
Dave: "I do, but my sister's wedding is in 11 days, so--"
Employees 1 and 2: "OH! OK, NEVER MIND!"

I wonder if that excuse would work in other situations. I'll have to test the theory. In any event, I've buried the lede a little bit like I always do, so let's get down to brass tacks. Low these past 200 days I have been eating differently, eating less, drinking less and exercising a shit ton more all in the name of looking decent in the few dozen photos I'll find myself in on just one of the (hopefully) thousands of days I've got left here. So far it's been going swimmingly, (no pun intended) though there have been fits and starts along the way and obstacles high and low. Oh, and some pretty unfortunate musical references, though one more is coming.

We have 30 days to go, people. It's crunch time.

Which is to say, I guess, I should be doing more crunches. I'm not sure that that's true, really. My stomach is tighter and less voluminous right now than it's been in at least eight years, and probably ever. But that doesn't mean the screws aren't tightening. I've maintained all along that it's those last few pounds that will cause the most trouble and with us just 30 days left before my stated June 22 deadline, those last few pounds are being tricky.

Depending on the day I'm anywhere from 3.5-7 pounds away from that magical number of 175, and getting much closer has proven extremely tricky. At this point, the lowest I've tipped the scales at is 178.4, a number I thought I might break this morning until I saw otherwise. All that said, I'm not beating myself up over it too much, clearly. As I've noted before, any particular number you see on a scale on any particular day isn't particularly trustworthy.

Still, I am human, am I not? I still crave that irrational satisfaction of seeing months of painstaking, deliberate accomplishment boiled down to one number for half a second if I can balance myself on my shitty scale just right. Considering my doctor told me recently there was no need for me to lose anymore weight for health purposes, this seems to be my raison d'être: To see a digitized number on a piece of plastic my mother bought nearly 10 years ago.

I think I need more things to do with my time.

More visual evidence that no one looks good exercising

Oh yeah. That's me right there to the right, looking less like an athlete and more like a cramping sloth whose shorts are way too tight as I make the final turn at a 10K I ran this past weekend in the lovely Newport section of Jersey City. My friend Theresa took it upon herself to snap this shot of me passing the girl I was using as a pace-setter for the final mile and while I would have preferred she didn't share it with the outside world, such is life sometimes. There I am, dragging myself through the last half mile of the longest distance I had ever run with my noticeable green and yellow shoes that are far too snazzy for a man with my fashion sensibilities.

On the plus side, though, it's hard to lose me in a crowd.

So yes, a few weeks after I ran an actual organized race for the first time, I decided to test my mettle again by doubling the distance. This may not have been wise. After all, 6.2 miles, while not an insurmountable distance, was not something I had ever pushed myself to. In fact, I often opt for the elliptical rather than jogging outside these days because I know my ankles and knees have gotten somewhat balky and running on pavement for roughly an hour straight isn't really going to help that. What's more, when you get past three miles or so, it's wise to kind of train for these things and gradually improve your mile base rather than just throwing yourself into the fire. My training involved exactly one run of 5.5 miles a week earlier, which nearly killed me since I may (definitely did) have had too much to drink the night before.

But hey, when you've lost 40 pounds in five months, I suppose you take it upon yourself to prove just how physically fit you are by indulging in these feats of endurance. If you're lucky like I am, the result of this is, well, survival. Beyond surviving, if you can deal with the lingering pain for at least a little while you're ahead of the game. In my case that pain was pretty ever-present, as I could feel some nasty discomfort hitting my right hip about halfway through the race. Fortunately for me, that is gone now, but my legs were extremely stiff for the first 48 hours after the race and just now are starting to loosen up a bit on me. All of those aches made the fact that my shoe got soaked when I stepped in a puddle during the first half mile seem immaterial by comparison.

When I reach the end, I will have my white whale

Call me hungry.

Sometimes in life there are curious developments, often driven by this most primal of urges. Things we don't understand, things that frighten us, things that make us strangely .... curious. It is the need to satisfy this urge, the need to satiate our stomach pains and hunger pangs, that can often drive us to the edge of sanity manifested not just in how voraciously or without order we consume something, but what it is that we are consuming. Perhaps we ignore the fact that all this time, the food is really consuming us. And if what we are consuming is not atypical enough, not extreme enough -- not enough of a challenge, well, at the end of the day, it simply won't do. As I continue down this long and lonesome road to svelteness it is easy to be distracted by the temptations of decadent food porn that are rampant across the internet -- spending your day at a computer with hours of internet access makes it easier still. After all, I am but a man, am I not?

As the Bible says, "We are but flesh and blood."

Sometimes, however, the mere pictures of these grand food items are not enough to satisfy those primal urges. We must indulge. We must know for ourselves that we found and conquered the beast. In the past I have sought out these dynamic gustatory adventures. Last April in Pittsburgh I not only had the vaunted pulled pork and pierogi stacker at Manny's BBQ in PNC Park, but also the Chickin' Little Headwich at Fathead's Saloon, a monstrous pile of buffalo sauce-soaked chicken fingers, ham, proscuitto, bacon, fried eggs, cheddar cheese and Chipotle mayo. In Kansas City last August I did a whirlwind tour of the town's vaunted most famous BBQ haunts, such as Gates Bar-B-Q and Arthur Bryant's -- for the second time. In Cincinnati last November, I downed a plate of Skyline Chili and engulfed a pulled pork, chorizo and fried onions concoction the next day. In Europe last summer I made a point to try whale, bear meatballs, wild boar sausage and reindeer sausage. I was disheartened that I was unable to try puffin while in Iceland. Indeed these absurd food challenges are things I have sought out, mountains I have climbed so I could tell the world, "Yes, I have eaten a bacon explosion," which, for the record, I have in fact eaten.

But we're trying to lose weight here, right? Isn't that the goal of these morning workouts, obnoxious Facebook updates and this droll-yet-pedantic blog? Why yes it is. So in the past several months large food ventures have been rare. I've strayed away from wild bizarre sandwiches while rarely indulging in pizza or cheeseburgers. My life has been depressingly devoid mac-n-cheese while salmon, ahi tuna and tilapia (which I recently found is quite good when seasoned with cinnamon) have taken all of their places.

And then there's Chipotle.

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.