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.

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 promise I will not be playing any Bon Jovi today

Last Saturday night I stood in a bar with some friends on the lower east side when suddenly "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey started blaring from the speakers. This isn't a terribly unusual occurrence. Anyone who has had alcohol in a public place in their 20s is probably all too familiar with this, but given that it was around 11:30 p.m. at the time, this did seem strangely early for it, as was pointed out by my friend Amy.

Perhaps more curious, though, was that we had not yet heard "Don't Stop Believin'"s companion in the "We always get played at bars so drunk girls can act excited about it as if it didn't happen last week" circuit. That song, of course, is this one. (Ok, I lied. Get over it.) If you're in a financial crunch, you can basically bank your life savings on the fact that at some point Saturday night in any bar in Murray Hill you'll hear four dozen 23-year-olds sing "Livin' on a Prayer" at the top of their lungs -- assuming you can find a bookie dumb enough to offer that bet.

This is kind of annoying, partially because none of these people can sing and partially because the experience ruins what is, really, a pretty fun catchy song. And as a result, it makes it doubly annoying that it was one of the first things that came to my mind as I stepped on the scale this morning.

See as you may or may not remember, while I aim to get myself down to 175 pounds by my sister's wedding this June, my starting weight was 219. That's 44 pounds which means if you passed second grade you can probably deduce that a weight of 197 pounds would be, well, "halfway there." Of course, I don't really think the work to get myself to the halfway point in my weight loss needs to driven by, well, "prayer." Nor is my likelihood of actually succeeding at this as unlikely as, say, achieving the American dream when I'm a striking dock worker and my wife, Gina, is a hard working diner waitress.

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.