After a week battling Johnny Reb, we're back in business

Nine score and 13 days ago, I set out on a journey to bring myself back into shape regardless of what obstacles, hindrances or summertime federal holidays came my way. Those who know me are more than familiar with my zest for July 4th, which is usually accompanied by a BBQ that is probably too much work and certainly too much food. But that's what life is about, right? Enjoying the time we have to relax in the sun, eat, drink, be merry and all those other cliches. Much like St. Kilda's lone Grand Final victory, that's the point of it all.

But when you have a goal in mind, sacrifices sometimes have to be made, and if I were truly dedicated to winning this battle of physical fitness, spending this past Memorial Day chomping on a plate full of sausages (to say nothing of the barbecued chicken, hamburgers and hot dogs) really wasn't the best way to make strides. This is all particularly alarming considering one very important thing.

Time is running out.

My sister's wedding is a mere 17 days away, which means, really, there is no time to dawdle. I ought to be in the gym every morning just as voraciously as I have been the past six months. Yes, I already am basically as thin, generally, as I'm going to get, and while it's not lost on my friends or family, it strangely hasn't been lost on the random assortment of neighborhood characters I run into on a near daily basis. In the past four days both the cashier at my local Duane Reade and this middle aged woman, who uses the gym at the same time as me every morning, commented at how much weight I've lost. This was particularly surprising from the middle-aged woman, whom I was convinced hated me ever since she made a face at me from the other elliptical machine some four months ago.

All of this is reassuring, and it's certainly confidence-inducing. But more importantly, it's pertinent to keep my nose to the grindstone because of how near we are to the end. In the great battle of weight-loss in 2013 we are currently in the last throes of the insurgency. This is a delicate time. So delicate, in fact, that it makes one wonder just how I could suddenly decide to take not just a day off, as I did this past Memorial Day, but nearly an entire week.

For that, I blame yet another insurgency.

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.