When your goal is to achieve social media fame by eating Chipotle every day for maybe a thousand days in a row, regular life events can present major challenges.

For Dillon Wareham of Mobile, the birth of his youngest child required some careful meal scheduling. Getting his daily burrito bowl while laid up after minor surgery required some support. And going on a family vacation meant he had to be a little devious.

“The biggest challenge was going on a cruise,” Wareham said this week. “That was a very stressful time for me. … I had to sneak it on. I had to get my bowls, wrap some clothes around them, shove them in the middle of my suitcase, and they made it on, thank God.”

“I’m a very determined person,” said Wareham.

Well, yeah, obviously. If you happen to have the Chipotle app on your phone, you’ll see his favorite order featured as a limited-time menu item through April. That’s because after more than a year of ordering that same basic dish every single day, Wareham was one of the winners of the chain’s Chipotle Taste Test competition, held in part to promote its new protein option, Chicken al Pastor.

He has eaten Chipotle for nearly 500 days in a row, usually at the store at Airport Boulevard and Schillinger Road in west Mobile, and the chain has playfully challenged him to make it 1,000. It’s safe to say this thing has snowballed – but that’s exactly what Wareham wanted.

His fixation fuses two of his interests: An appreciation for Chipotle, and a desire to be a full-time social media content creator.

Wareham, 29, was born in California. His father, a pastor, moved the family to Colorado, where Wareham first tasted the fast-casual delights of Chipotle Mexican Grill. When Wareham was about 18 the family moved to the Mobile area, where the was no Chipotle, at least for a while. Rest assured, when it arrived he was one of the first in line.

At 29 he’s married, a father of two, working as a foreman at a small painting company. He’s also an aspiring social media star. A few years ago, he noticed that his younger brother was spending a lot of time watching YouTube. Wareham got the appeal of the content generated by popular creators but didn’t necessarily agree with their rock-star behavior. He figured he could learn the content side and do better on the values side.

“I could be the better example,” he said. “Not that I’m a perfect person, but I don’t drink, I don’t party. I’ve never been into that, I don’t cuss.”

YouTube, he found, was a tough nut to crack. It’s “a hard platform to grow on,” he said.

Sometime around 2020 he switched his focus to TikTok and found it easier. He got to 25,000 followers in short order, he said. He then challenged himself to keep gaining momentum.

“I was already eating Chipotle three or four times a week,” he said. “I was sitting in my car one night thinking, ‘I’ve got to start something that I can do daily.’ I was just doing little prank videos, whatever I could think of to just make content. So I was like, ‘I literally eat here three-four times a week. So I just need to step up and I’m going to start eating here every day, and we’ll just see where this goes.’”

And that was day one. “It seems like a lifetime ago, now,” Wareham said.

Every day, for more than a year, Wareham had a bowl from the chain and posted a Tiktok video of himself doing it.

“Chipotle actually reached out to me on Day 369,” he said. “It was the first time we made contact. They sent me a gift card and a note that said, ‘Bet you can’t make it 1,000. Here’s a gift to keep you going.’”

“I’m not a gambler but I do accept challenges,” he said.

When the restaurant launched the Taste Test Challenge early this year, it was a given he’d enter. His entry video spells out his go-to order: A bowl with white rice, chicken (chicken al pastor in this case), mild sauce, “a lot of cheese, a little bit of lettuce.”

Commenters have called the bowl a little basic. “No sour cream is crazy,” posted one early commenter. “Bro likes his food extra mild,” said another. But Wareham said there’s a method to his white-rice-and-chicken madness.

“I do eat the same bowl every day. I get the chicken bowl with white rice, extra rice, mild sauce and cheese and lettuce,” he said. “That is my bowl that I eat every day. It’s a healthy bowl so I can eat it every day and not gain weight. I’m a very active person. I go to the gym five-six days a week. I actually ran 10 miles yesterday, which I’m very much still paying for today.”

(Note: This week, as Day 478 fell on national Burrito Day, so Dillon got a burrito. But he used the same formula as he does for his bowls.)

Another key point. “If I’ve got the funds for the week,” he said, he’ll dress it up a little bit. So the flavor does change, as does the price.

“It definitely varies depending on what I get,” he said. “Usually I don’t get out of there under $20. Sometimes it’s all the way up to close to $20, if I get double protein, guac and an Izze, which is a glass-bottle drink, we’re right at $20.”

That means his quest so far has almost certainly cost more than $5,000. That’s been defrayed a smidge by the “Chipotle for a Year” prize that came with the Taste Test win.

“I did get a year free for most people, when I won the Taste Challenge, because most people are going to eat it once a week,” he said. “So it was 52 entrees. For most people that’s a year, for me it’s right at, almost, two months.”

No problem. That’ll get him past 500 days, which as far as he knows is the record for consecutive Chipotle days. He’ll probably keep right on going. He’s got his eye on the long game. He’d like to earn a “Chipotle VIP card,” also known as a celebrity card, a semi-mythical free dining card.

When they challenged him to go 1,000 days, he said, he gave them a little challenge right back. “I said, ‘I’ll do the thousand days, but at the thousandth day, you guys buy me my dream car.’” The answer, he said, was a cryptic “We’ll see.”

One other perk of his win was having his favorite entrée reviewed by TikTok star Keith Lee, who has 11.5 million followers on the platform. Lee, who worked with Chipotle on the contest, rated it 9 out of 10. “It is very simple, but it do taste good,” opined Lee.

“That was amazing,” said Wareham. “He just seems like such a good person. I’ve never got to meet him but he seems like an awesome person. I’m also a Christian so I love how he always talks about God in his videos and stuff like that.”

Every little bit of exposure helps, said Wareham.

“Every time you gain three-four followers, that’s another brick, that’s another piece of the building you’re building,” he said. And he knows what he wants to build.

“I would love to be Flo from Progressive for Chipotle,” he said. “I would love to be that guy. I would love to do commercials with the company. I think there are already several people that when they see my face, they think of Chipotle. I’ve got right at 75,000 followers, I’m sure when they see me they’re like ‘Oh, there’s the Chipotle guy.’”

Bigger than that, he said, is his goal to break through to the point where his pastime becomes a career.

“One of my big goals is to be a full-time creator,” he said. “So I will not quit. That’s one thing that’s going to happen for sure, it’s just a matter of time.”