The McDiet

To all you fast food lovers out there, let me first clarify that I'm not obsessed about my weight or my health but I'm a big proponent of good food. I don't understand why people are paying the same price for food that tastes terrible, is extremely processed and bad for you when you can get a much healthier alternative for the same price! And no, a salad at McDonald's doesn't count as healthy.

Here's the thing, I found this Associated Press article about this woman from Raleigh, North Carolina who apparently lost weight eating McDonald's for 90 days ala Morgan Spurlock (who did it for 30 days) in "Super Size Me" -- if you haven't seen the documentary, go out and watch it, makes you sick. Apparently, this woman felt that "Super Size Me" had "unfairly targeted the world's largest restaurant company and implied that the obese were victims of a careless corporate giant." So what does this fat mother-of-two who's probably digging an early grave for her children by feeding them Happy Meals decide to do? This woman, ate nothing but McDonald's for 90 days and apparently lost 37 pounds in the process. And oh, she works as a construction worker.

What's my reaction to this utterly stupid piece of news? Well, let's see -- to start with, the fat cow weighed 227 pounds at the beginning of her diet (that's more than twice my weight!) and she confined herself to only consuming 1,400 calories a day from McDonald's. Oh duh, anybody can tell you that if you were waaaay overweight and kept to a strict diet of the suggested daily calories, YOU WILL DEFINITELY LOSE WEIGHT. And to top it off, she's a freakin' construction worker for gawd's sake, the amount of physical activity she gets in addition to the 1,400 calorie diet that she apparently claimed she was on obvious helped her lose weight. Jesus. Even I consume more than 1,400 calories a day.

What this McDiet woman did was she went to the McDonald's web site and created a menu according to the nutritional information (Nutritional McDonald's - now there's an oxymoron). So off I went, to McDonald's Bag A McMeal web site where you can click on items that you want to eat and it counts the amount of calories for you. Here's what I've discovered (besides the fact that the woman's bullshitting):

If I ate a meal at McDonald's (which I never do anymore), here's what I would eat:
McNuggets 6pc
Sweet & Sour sauce
Small fries
2 packets of ketchup
Medium orange juice (not freshly squeeze, Minute Maid crap)
Total: 730 calories

A regular person would eat:
Double cheeseburger
2 packets of ketchup
Medium fries
Medium coke
Total: 1050 calories

A bound-for-early-death American would eat:
Big Mac
4 packets of ketchup
Large fries
Large coke
Hot fudge sundae
Total: 1780 calories [380 calories more than what the cow had a day]

And for you McDonald's skeptics who think that a salad at McDonald's is a healthy choice, you would eat:
Caesar salad with grilled chicken
Low fat Italian dressing
Medium orange juice
Total: 450 calories

Here's the deal -- unless the woman who claimed that she lost 37 pounds in 3 months ate nothing but the salad meal or splurged on a hamburger, small fries and medium orange juice (690 calories) twice a day, every day for 3 months -- there was no way that she would have lost weight.

I'm not saying that she lied about losing weight, but what I'm saying is that her experiment has so many flaws that I'm amazed the story was picked up by Associated Press. Think about it, physical exercise + 1,400 daily calorie intake + overweight person obviously = weight lost.

I think fast food is disgusting and is not only bad for your personal health, but bad for the environment as well. Because the food is sooooo procesed, it takes longer than usual to rot, which means more garbage! And then, there's the amount of plastic that's used -- the cup, straw, burger wrapper, ketchup packet, etc. -- problem is, there are tons of idiots out there who litter these things all over the place.

Go read the McDiet article from Associated Press and please tell me you're cutting back on fast food. Better still, not eat it at all!