Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Presenting, The McDonald's Diet!! (You knew it was coming, didn't you!)

You know, a couple of weeks ago at the insistence of my kids, we rented Supersize Me. It looked quite convincing, and though I don't often eat at Ronald's, it put me off his food for some time.


But I've been thinking about some of the ways he made that film, and what really happened during it. I mean, he stopped exercising the day he started eating at McDonalds. Stopping a regular exercise routine's gotta give your body a hit, let alone over doing it at fast food.


Tonight while driving home, I heard an interview with an Edmonton teacher named Les Sayer who was pushed into the same kind of month full of McDonalds test by his students. Tomorrow marks his last day on the McDonalds only diet. The last day of 30 in which he only ate McDonalds meals, three times a day. The only item he didn't try was the fish sandwich, because he hates fish.


But, he tried not to over eat a lot, and he tried to eat a variety of things regularly including deserts. The other thing he did was exercise, daily I believe.


So, how's he doing?


Well, as of today he's down 18 lbs for the month.


Yeah. That's what I said.


He presents a good argument. You can check it out at http://www.mcles.com/


Hmm, exercise daily, eat a variety, and don't over do it. I wonder how that would sell to the mass market?

7 comments:

  1. Interesting. Small Dead Animals posted about the very same thing today, but I didn't pay much attention because I (mistakenly) assumed she tie it into something tearing into "socialists". Aparently not.



    One of my Christmas gifts was "Fastfood Nation", a book which may shed some more light on this issue.



    Incidentally, "Supersize Me" was also a Christmas gift to me, and it was wrapped in your online wrapping paper!

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  2. My "beef" with the fast food industry is that their food tends to be loaded with more saturated fats, trans fats, monosodium glutamate (MSG), refined sugar, and dyes like tetrazine (with proven negative side effects) than what a person would normally eat at home. And really, we shouldn't be eating those things anyway.



    In theory, one could lose weight eating almost anything. You just need to burn up all the energy you are injesting. I've never gone on a diet, but if I do, I am pretty sure it will be the twinkie diet. Take that Atkins.

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  3. In the DVD extras the Supersize Me guy interviews the guy who wrote "Fast Food Nation". Apparently, when you are eating a hamburger you are eating not, as one might reasonably expect, the ground-up extra bits (hooves, eyes, intestines, etc.) of one cow: you are, in fact, eating little ground-up bits from about 10,000 different cows! That should be enough to get a person off of burgers....



    But MAN does a "Classic Single" or a "Whopper" sit well sometimes!

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  4. See, how could you get bits and pieces from 10,000 different cows, in one room?!?



    That I don't get.



    And, try a Classic Double, at least!!

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  5. I'm with Clinton, it's the chemicals and crap that are the worst, but unfortunately we often unknowingly get those same chemicals when we buy processed food to prepare and eat at home. There still bad and education is the greatest tool to fix that problem.



    The thing that got me wasn't his huge weight gain, but his depression and sickness and general poor health. Yes, we should exercise, but most people do not, so that's what most people will get.

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  6. Well, you wouldn't get chunks of 10,000 cows into one room. But one patty could be formed out of tiny little pieces from 10,000 cows.



    I don't think that number is to be taken literally. I think what he means is that contrary to what we might imagine, they don't take one cow to the slaughter-house, grind her up, and then make patties out of her. Rather, they send thousands of cows to the slaughter house, mix all their ground meat together, package it, and send it out to whoever it is that makes hamburger patties.



    Put it this way: if you were to take a cow and somehow dye all of the cells in its body flourescent green, you shouldn't expect someone to find a box of flourescent-green hamburger patties at their grocery store, or a fast-food restaurant to receive a shipment of fluorescent green patties. You are not likely to find any of the flourescent green remnants of said cow; if you did find any, they would be miniscule.



    I don't know this as a scientific fact, of course, but that's how I understand the 10,000 cow point.

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  7. The Supersize Me! guy is the Michael Moore of fast food. It's an opinion piece, and shouldn't be regarded as objective fact. It's good to see this schoolteacher providing some balance.

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