Continuing my updates for my local gym's The Biggest Loser competition, here's Week #10.

Just to recap last week, I "threw the gauntlet down" against my fellow co-workers who were running their own Biggest Loser contest. I did a one way $100 bet against all 5 players that I could beat their weight percentage lost.

One of the players who we'll call "J" emailed me, "You threw it down and I just picked it up! Your $100 beans is all mine!"

Now that's the kind of smack talk I need to get my butt in gear and lose some more weight!

As for the other players, one player whom we'll call "D" sounded quite confident he could beat me. He asked my starting weight and my goal weight. He's a much bigger guy than I am so he can certainly lose more pounds than me - the big question is can he beat my percentage. He seemed confident he could. Good luck with that Big D! Hey wait, that's a McDonald's sandwich!

Another player whom we'll call "T" was skeptical he could match my weight loss numbers. He said something to the effect of "It's much harder for me because I have to lose a lot more pounds than Tom does." I guess no $100 for him. Of course, he could be playing coy so I don't try as hard. As for the other 2 players "R" & "A" no comments so far.

In any event, here's this week's update including all previous 9 weeks for context. As I told some high school friends via email, I made them a "guarantee" I would lose at least 5 pounds or I would have to give up "something" that I would sorely miss. Fortunately, I knew I would lose at least 5 pounds this week because of the "new challenge" from my co-workers giving me new motivation. Nothing like a little inter-office rivalry to get my Irish pride going.

My weight loss this week? A whopping 6 pounds! As Emeril would say - BAM!! This is my largest weight loss since Week 2 where I lost 9 pounds. And now for my next prediction, I predict I will win the next Powerball even if the previous $275 million jackpot will reset to something puny - like $20 million. (Just kidding. I don't gamble.)

Here's the full week-by-week recap:

Week 1 (Jan 14th) - weighed in at 198lbs (original weight)
Week 2 (Jan 21st) - weighed in at 189lbs (-9 lbs)
Week 3 (Jan 28th) - weighted in at 189lbs (0 change)
Week 4 (Feb 4th) - weighed in at 186lbs (-3 lbs)
Week 5 (Feb 11th) - weighed in at 186lbs (0 change)
Week 6 (Feb 18th) - weighed in at 184lbs (-2 lbs).
Week 7 (Feb 25th) - weighed in at 183lbs (-1 lbs).
Week 8 (March 3rd) - weighed in at 180lbs (-3 lbs).
Week 9 (March 10th) - weighed in at 180lbs (0 change).

This week:
Week 10 (March 17th) - weighed in at 174lbs (-6 lbs).