Running a race? Me? Really? Don't be ridiculous.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not fast. I never have been. I've come to terms with the fact that I never will be. As someone who has watched more than his fair share of sports both professionally and for fun, I know that athleticism is a physical characteristic that never leaves you. If you have it, you have it. And ladies and gentlemen, I don't have it.

That's fine. I've accepted my lack of velocity ever since I "ran" a mile for gym class at age 10 and clocked in at a robust 17:18. Granted, this is mostly due to the fact that I walked the entire thing with my friend Matt, but over the 17 years that have passed since I have not shown the predilection nor the aptitude for learning how to run one faster than that. And that's ok.

Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I had, in fact, gotten faster. In high school when I "played" football -- there's a reason "played" is in quotes -- I ran a timed mile in 8:30, though I did weigh significantly more at the time. While I didn't time myself at any point, I did begin to run on a regular basis in college, sometimes as many as seven days a week, usually at a fair brisk pace and never indoors. Given that I went to school near Chicago, this was not a smart idea for approximately 11.5 months out of the year.

If you'd ever like to know what lake-effect snow in your face feels like in -20-degree weather, I'm happy to tell you. It isn't good.

But I never ran races. Never. I was not one of those people who trained for road races and became obsessed with collecting bibs, breaking their PRs or measuring my splits. In fact, I had never run a race before in my entire life, and while the idea of running a marathon was always an athletic achievement I had considered striving for, it's become extremely clear to me over the years that I'm far more interested in telling people I ran a marathon after the fact than I am in actually doing it. After all, why would I want to duplicate a feat that killed the first person to ever accomplish it? Seems somewhat counterintuitive when applied to my general goal of staying alive.

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.

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.

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.

The Week of Eating Dangerously

In his seminal 1859 work on the theory of evolution On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin posited the idea that dramatic genetic changes that comprised evolution's basic ideal of survival of the fittest came in short bursts of drastic mutation separated by extended periods of little to no movement up the evolutionary ladder, the concept of "punctuated equilibrium."

Weight loss isn't all that different in its Darwinian timing mechanism. Plateaus will periodically keep you stuck on a number for potentially weeks at a time. I was stuck at 205.8 pounds for nearly a month from late December to late January. However, the flip side of this is that these long static stretches of little to no weight loss are bookended by periods in which the pounds just seem to disappear at chunks at a time for four or five days. Look no further than last week when a big meal Monday night could have pushed me close to 200 pounds before the requisite digesting, but by Saturday evening I tipped the scales after my workout at just 191.8 pounds, more than 27 pounds lower than my starting point just over three months ago.

The key to these stretches is to not disrupt the natural order. As Ray Bradbury noted in his famous short story A Sound of Thunder, in which a wealthy dinosaur hunter travels to the past and dramatically alters human history when he accidentally kills a butterfly, (Personally, I prefer the classic "Time and Punishment" segment from The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror V" episode), a slight change to something in the intended course of actions can have a dramatic and sometimes disastrous effect. When losing weight, one cannot disrupt the natural order if they intend to keep losing weight, and that means not simply exercising and watching what you eat, but harnessing and riding those periods when you can't lose pounds fast enough. If your exercise and diet are causing you to drop .8 pounds per day, behave like a gambler who doesn't understand the concept of quitting while you're ahead and let it ride.

Unless, of course, you're an idiot like me. If you are, rather than let it ride when you're this close to your next Chipotle burrito bowl and watching those pounds roll off, you're instead going to have a salty greasy dinner because you're watching some ridiculously stupid television event, which involves consuming a massive amount of pizza. And to make matters even worse, you finish in second place in your Oscar pool by one point because you didn't pick Innocente to win Best Documentary -- Short Subject, and fellow Millburn High School alum Anne Hathaway just casually disregards you during her acceptance speech.

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.