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.

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.

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.