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.

Passover: Friend of Foe?

For those of you that know me, which I have to assume is absolutely anyone that reads this blog, you already know that I'm Jewish. After all, it's not like I keep it a secret. But the impact of Judaism on my diet is usually not terribly dramatic, though if anything, it does have a tendency to induce more eating because what Jewish family gathering is complete without loud political debates, frequent hand-gesturing and a ton of food?

None. That's how many.

So yeah, my family enjoys a good meal, which in the past hasn't exactly served me terribly well as I look to keep the waistline under control. Not that I mean to blame my parents for my own lack of self control, but the idea for us that if you're going to eat, you might as well eat well, isn't unusual. It is rare, however, that Judaism finds a way to actually restrict my diet. After all, I don't keep kosher, which means cheeseburgers, bacon and shrimp fairly regular choices. But there are two times every year when being Jewish actually has to hold my food choices in check, with one being Yom Kippur -- a straight "Don't eat or drink for 24 hours" bonanza -- and the far more fickle yeast-free Passover.

And lo and behold, here we are.

Passover is typically observed by, among other things, not eating bread for seven days. (Yes, I know some more conservative adherents don't eat bread for eight days, but if you look up why that tradition was established, you can see that it's totally ludicrous and completely unnecessary in modern times. Some Haggadot have been updated to reflect this.) But bread isn't the only thing to avoid. I can't drink beer, cookies, pasta, most cereals or any number of other foods made with yeast or leaven. Instead I get to eat matzah, which every gentile seems to think is awesome, and every Jew knows is an oversized flavorless saltine, which begs the question of how any person, Jewish or gentile, could possibly think matzah is awesome. But there is matzo ball soup, which is pretty fantastic.

Now, on the surface, an inability to eat wasteful carbohydrates should seem like a blessing in disguise if I'm trying to cut weight. After all, in this Atkins Diet world (note: I think the Atkins Diet, or any other fad diet, is total bullshit), everyone knows that carbs are basically the worst things known to man and not at all necessary to live properly and keep your brain in proper chemical balance. Nope, they just make you all big and fat. You don't need them to live.

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.