Super Size Me

Please see this movie. wow, it was a good documentary. It really made me understand why I feel the way I feel sometimes inside, because of all the crappy food I am eating.

This guy went on a mc donalds diet for 30 days, couldn't eat anything else and if they offered it super size, he had to accept. 12 days into it he was already feeling sick and his Cholesterol and other health factors sky rocketed.

It should be in your local blockbuster store.

 

i almost rewnted it -- got sunshine instead. i'll get it next. or the erroll morris one.

 

there was a lady here in charlotte that did the same thing...nothing but mcdonald's for a month. she lost 6 pounds...and she was thin to begin with.

the article was in last Sunday's paper.

 

this movie was awesome. i own it. its great

 

mother fucking mcdonalds no longer has supersized french fries because of this movie. bastard.

i like how he quit exercising as much as he used to. and of course, he toured the country while doing his experiment (a 30 day road-trip would mess with anybody's system). plus, he didn't like the food after a while. that's a form of torture, really -- having to eat something you don't like three times a day. it's mild, but i'm sure it would make you unhappy if not utterly depressed.

i eat a lot of fast food. i'm 5'8", 135 pounds and holding for 20 years. dunno my colesterol, but my BP is healthily low.

 

same here..if you work out you can pretty much eat anything. i'm not a fat fuck and enjoy my super size fries..

oh wait, burger king has king size.

 

but he also featured the dude that ate two big macs per day for over twenty years and has very low cholesterol.

 

A month at McDonald's

Fast food. Every meal. 30 days ...

KAREN GARLOCH

Staff Writer


A month at McDonald's Fast food. Every meal. 30 days ...

Jodi Peckich has the discipline most of us can't imagine.

Just look around at McDonald's. Most people are eating hamburgers and French fries. Fast food is the American way, and it's making us fat.

But when Jodi goes to McDonald's, she sees a menu with options. She sees beyond Big Macs, beyond the Deluxe Breakfast, beyond Chicken McNuggets. She sees beyond the special sauce and cheese, beyond the sausages and pancakes, beyond honey mustard and barbecue dips.

This is a woman who can smell French fries and resist eating them, who can order a Quarter Pounder without cheese, who can happily choose grilled chicken over fried.

In fact, this is a woman who vowed to eat healthy at McDonald's for an entire month. Every meal. Every snack. Down to the ketchup and the Sweet'N Low.

She got the idea after watching the documentary "Super Size Me."

It follows filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's 30-day "McDiet," long on Big Macs and super-sized, sugary colas. He gained more than 25 pounds, and his cholesterol shot up 70 points. He got so sick his doctors warned him to stop before he dropped dead.

Jodi agrees with Spurlock that too many children and adults eat too much fat and too many calories. She knew he went to an extreme to make a point.

She thought she could, too.

As she left the documentary, Jodi, a Huntersville fitness trainer who's studying holistic nutrition, began planning her own McMonthly experiment.

"You can eat a healthy diet, even at McDonald's," she said.

2,000 calories a day

Naturally, Jodi made a plan.She called it "McMaintenance."

She would eat her usual 2,000 calories a day, get all the recommended daily vitamins and minerals and continue her regular workouts -- aerobics and weightlifting at least five mornings a week.

Except for water, Jodi would get every meal, drink and snack from McDonald's. She searched the "Bag A Meal" section of McDonald's Web site to analyze the menu for calories, fat and salt.

Some offerings would never touch her lips.

The thick Big Mac, laden with special sauce and cheese, has too much fat (33 grams) and too many calories (600). Same for the Deluxe Breakfast, a feast of eggs, sausage and pancakes (61 fat grams and 1,190 calories). She wouldn't eat Chicken McNuggets either, because they have ... who knows what they have?

On the first day of her experiment, July 1, Jodi weighed in at her doctor's office.

At 31, the former University of Pittsburgh cheerleader was fit and trim. Height: 5 feet 6 inches. Weight: 118.8 pounds. Body fat: an amazingly low 11.1 percent. Cholesterol level: 182, within the normal range.

From the doctor's office, Jodi drove to the McDonald's at Interstate 77 and Exit 25.

Bacon beckoned from the grill. Her 10-year-old son, A.J., ordered a Bacon, Egg & Cheese Bagel, but Jodi chose healthier items, a la carte -- a side order of scrambled eggs and a Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait with granola (160 calories each). Hot tea with Sweet'N Low added zero calories.

She felt satisfied and proud.

For lunch, at a University-area McDonald's, she ordered a Chicken McGrill sandwich (skipping the mayonnaise cut it from 400 to 300 calories). She added a half container of buffalo sauce (25 calories).

She also ordered a bag of fresh apple slices called Apple Dippers, a new alternative to French fries offered with the Happy Meal (35 calories). She ate them with half a container of low-fat caramel dip (50 calories).

At home in mid-afternoon, she snacked on a bag of McDonaldland cookies (230 calories).

 

That night, she, her husband, Tony, and A.J. ate together at a McDonald's in Pineville after A.J.'s hockey practice.

While Tony ate a burger and A.J. had fried chicken strips, Jodi chose a California Cobb Salad with Grilled Chicken, croutons and low-fat balsamic vinaigrette dressing (total 360 calories) and a reduced-fat ice cream cone (250 calories).

Her first-day total: 1,560 calories.

"Normally I eat more calories," she wrote in her laptop computer that night, "but I've thrown my system for a loop. ... I just don't feel hungry."

Stocking up on snacks

On the second day, Jodi wrote: "I see the menu losing appeal already ... It could be a longer 30 days than originally expected."

As the month went on, she learned some tricks.

Always a planner, she sometimes went "grocery shopping" at McDonald's, stocking up on parfaits, cookies and cartons of low-fat milk, so she wouldn't have to run out every time she got hungry.

To avoid all the sodium in the balsamic vinaigrette dressing (730 milligrams, nearly a third of the recommended daily intake), she ordered salsa with her salads.

She substituted chicken for ground beef in the Fiesta Salad until the manager at one University-area restaurant wouldn't allow it. It was odd, she thought, to be told that substituting chicken for beef was "too expensive," but adding bacon to her son's cheeseburger was not a problem.

Sometimes, Jodi ordered hamburgers herself, but never the really high-fat ones. She'd get the regular burger (280 calories), the Quarter Pounder without cheese (420 calories) or the Big N' Tasty (420 calories without the mayonnaise).

Sometimes she even ate French fries, but only a small order (230 calories compared to 520 in the large). And sometimes she ate only half of that.

Once she offered her large order of Extra Value Meal fries to a man behind her in line. He was so grateful, she said. "You would have thought I gave him gold."

To keep things interesting, Jodi tried more than a dozen restaurants, all the way from Pineville in the south to Mooresville in the north.

But she became a regular in Huntersville, 11.2 miles from her home, where she found the staff "extra friendly."

When Jodi drove up, morning shift manager Elsie Collins recognized her and automatically ordered an Egg McMuffin without cheese and a yogurt parfait.

Afternoon shift manager Kim Campbell got to know Jodi too, and frequently complimented her on her accessories, especially a brown leather watchband and a silver and topaz necklace.

They knew the usual orders for a lot of their customers, but neither of them knew of Jodi's secret plan.

Keeping the secret

Jodi and Tony had agreed they wouldn't tell anyone about the "McMaintenance" project until it was over. But sometimes they couldn't help it.On July 5, they had dinner with friends at Phil and Tony's Brick Oven Pizza Bar in the Arboretum shopping center.

Before going to the restaurant, Jodi stopped at McDonald's to order a Bacon Ranch Salad with Grilled Chicken (250 calories). She carried it in with her, behind her back, and stowed it quickly under her chair.

When the waitress arrived, Jodi explained only that she was on a special diet and could not order from the menu. No problem, the waitress said, and she brought an empty plate.

Jodi ate her pre-packaged salad while Tony and their friends enjoyed stuffed mushrooms, spinach-crab dip, buffalo chicken pizza and lasagna.

"They had the better end of the deal," Jodi later wrote.

She walked out of the restaurant with McDonald's trash under her sweater. But she didn't deprive herself of dessert. That night she drove back to McDonald's for an ice cream cone. Then for a bedtime snack, she ate a box of McDonaldland cookies at her kitchen counter. "I like something a little sweet before bed."

She still counted only 1,785 calories for the day.

3:30 a.m. craving

On the seventh day into her experiment, Jodi woke at 3:30 in the morning.

She was hungry. And feeling deprived.

As always, she had planned for this moment.

She tromped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator where she had stashed a box of Chicken Selects, four fried chicken breast strips, "just in case."

She ate them all. Slowly. With a few dips of ranch sauce. Savoring every bite.

"Wow," she wrote in her journal. "It tasted great."

But there was a price.

Because she wouldn't go over her calorie limit, that middle-of-the-night snack would have to count as breakfast.

She didn't eat again until noon.

Tea at the movies

After that crash, Jodi never craved fried chicken again in July.In fact, she had allowed herself three servings of fried foods a week, but ended up eating only six all month.

Jodi's resolve didn't even crack at the movies, where the warm, salty aroma of popcorn can revive hunger even if you've just finished Sunday dinner at mom's.

She did miss Junior Mints, refreshing little balls of chocolate and cool mint she liked to let dissolve slowly on her tongue.

But she resisted and ordered hot tea instead.

So as not to violate her rules, she threw away the tea bag from the theater and pulled out a packet of black-and-orange pekoe tea, saved from a previous trip to McDonald's.

The final dinner

By July 30, Jodi had eaten 39 bags of Apple Dippers, 33 yogurt parfaits, 28 salads, 17 ice cream cones and 13 burgers.

She was ready for the end.

For her final dinner, she celebrated with Tony and A.J.

They drove to the swanky, two-story McDonald's across from SouthPark mall. They dressed up a table with their own royal blue table cloth, plastic plates, forks and cups. She lit a red pillar candle in the center of the table. The grand piano in the window played a Sinatra tune.

Other patrons noticed and smiled. When she told the manager-on-duty what she had done, he offered to take pictures.

Jodi splurged with a hamburger Happy Meal, including small fries, and a hot fudge sundae.

This one time, she didn't even count the calories.

She steps on the scales

On July 31, the experiment was over.

It was time to measure the results.

Did Jodi gain weight? Did her health suffer?

No. And maybe.

When she stepped on the scales at her doctor's office, she found, to her surprise, that she had actually lost six pounds. From 118.8 to 112.8.

Not unexpectedly, her cholesterol rose from 182 to 224, into the "borderline high" range. Her LDL (bad cholesterol) rose from 81 to 104, higher than the optimal level of less than 100.

But there were other surprises: Her HDL (good cholesterol) got better, rising from 85 to 110. Her triglycerides, another type of fat in the bloodstream, also improved, dropping from 82 to 50; normal is below 150.

Jodi's doctor wasn't too concerned about the changes. She predicted Jodi's numbers would go back to normal when she returned to her regular diet.

And Jodi couldn't wait.

She had missed green vegetables. Thank goodness for the meager McDonald's offerings -- lettuce, tomato and onion on sandwiches; grape tomatoes, carrot strips and radicchio in salads.

And she had missed her routine.

That morning at home, she ate a precisely measured breakfast of oatmeal (1/2 cup), blueberries (1/3 cup) and skim milk (1/4 cup.)

For lunch, one large slice of pizza with red peppers and mushrooms from Due Amici.

In early evening, she had a snack: 1 cup Honey Graham Life cereal and 1/2 cup skim milk, a few sips of orange juice.

For dinner, she drank a glass of pinot grigio with a six-inch tofu, cheese and veggie sub at Mellow Mushroom.

In the end, she hadn't really minded her month of McDonald's. She's been back several times, especially for ice cream cones.

Still, it's not a diet she'd recommend. She was just trying to make a point.

"At a time when our country's obesity rates are skyrocketing, people need to take responsibility," she said. "Know what your options are when you go out to eat fast food. You're not always stuck with huge portions. You don't have to compromise taste either."

No, McDonald's didn't pay her to say that.

Yes, she would like to write a book about her project.

She's got a good start, with 54 single-spaced pages of journal notes and a stack of receipts for $473 worth of McDonald's meals.

 

Cool! I believe it's true.. but for most people, they order the nasty stuff.. and I think it really depends on the person.