The good news for Maccas addicts?A US man claims to have lost 16.7kg by eating nothing but McDonald’s for 90 days. The bad news for Maccas addicts? He did it the same way you would with any other kind of food — by choosing carefully, focusing on lower-calorie options and exercising regularly. No silver bullet here.
Picture: Getty Images
Science teacher John Cisna ate an all-McDonald’s diet for three months, but ensured that his total calorie intake was just 2000 calories a day (roughly 8300 kilojoules, which is not a massively restricted intake). That typically equated to egg white omelettes and porridge with low-fat milk for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a value meal for dinner. He also exercised for 45 minutes a day.
You could do the same thing with any form of takeaway food, presuming you can find enough low-salt options and vegetables on the menu. (Some of the options Cisna chose aren’t served in Australia, but we do have other alternatives.) Let this serve as a reminder that takeaway food isn’t inherently and inescapably unhealthy: it’s how you approach it that matters.
‘Super Size Me’ idea leads to big weight LOSS for Iowa man [New York Daily News]
Comments
16 responses to “How To Lose Weight By Eating McDonald’s”
I quite often eat Mcdonald’s Chicken salads when I cbf cooking. I quite like them.
Going to McDonalds for a salad is like going to a prostitute for a hug.
Spoken like someone who has never eaten one. They’re tasty, healthy, and cheap.
He did it wrong. Everyone knows that if you are doing IIFYM you are meant to eat all poptarts!
The basic PHYSICS of weight-loss are pretty simple. Ever heard of the conservation of mass?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass
In a nutshell: if energy consumed is less than energy expended, mass is reduced, converted into energy. You cannot defy physics, that’s just how things work. Now… ‘weight’ and ‘size’ is a little funny because it’s not a direct equivalent of mass, but it’s pretty damn close for human dieting purposes.
And typically, the main reason that fats and sugars get a bad rap is because we have more of them than our body needs, so they get stored. Real fast. And we don’t WANT them stored. Buf if you’re exercising like a mofo, then all of them will get used. And that’s good. Go look up what Michael Phelps’ diet was when he was in his prime. So much ‘crap’ in there, but the fact is he was USING it. All of it.
Also, people complain about the amount of salt in fast foods, but the fact is that not enough salt in your diet is just as harmful as too much, and if you’re exercising a lot, you’re going to lose a lot of salt in your sweat.
(Edit: Oh, people go on about fruit and vegetables too, but the primary purpose of those is vitamins and fibre. Vitamins you can get in a pill, more reliable and effective than vegies themselves. Multivitamins are cool and you should take them. Anything that doesn’t get used gets flushed out of the body anyway, which is especially noticable in the case of vitamin B – that’s the one that makes your pee fluoro yellow.)
At the end of the day, you have a ‘budget’ of calories. That budget is set by how many you’re going to burn – walking, talking, working, exercising, screwing, sleeping, breathing… and when you’re going to burn them. (Stored stuff is harder to shift than stuff sitting in the ‘ready room’ of your digestive system.)
In the most simple terms, whether something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is largely a function of whether it puts you over-budget or not. So there’s no surprise you could do pretty well on a macca’s diet.
TLDR eat less energy than you expend and you can eat whatever you want?
Pretty much, with a few caveats:
1) You have to time what you eat around when you’re expending energy or you’ll lose the wrong parts of your mass.
2) You still need vitamins and fibre. You can get pill/powder supplements for both, if you don’t want to pay any attention to your diet at all.
3) The simplistic ‘conservation of mass’ observation only deals with weight loss, which is not the same as ‘living healthily’ – a much more complex machine. Eg: Replacing anti-oxidants with suspected carcinogens isn’t going to do much for your long-term health.
Good man, good man.
Agreed, except for one thing. Not all vitamins get flushed out when they’re not needed, only water-soluble vitamins do. Fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) are actually stored in the liver and in adipose tissue, and can actually build up to a toxic level if taken to excess.
Right. I was more thinking of anyone worrying about the overlap between a multi and the vitamins found naturally in your diet – even a fast food diet.
Taking a ‘once a day’ multivitamin more than once a day definitely isn’t the cleverest thing to be doing.
(Yes, it’s known that C and B have really short half-lives and can be taken more regularly, but that should definitely be done separately to your multi, which is going to contain a bunch of minerals you don’t want to overdose on.)
So where is the documentary on this, ‘Regular Size Me’ ?
I always said that SuperSize me was stupid in the way they did it. I also think the man who did it was a bad person for it.
lol @ “regular size me”
Lol, iIFYM lol
The problem with this is you’re not going to be able to eat that much by McDonalds’ standards.
One Big Mac meal is around 1100 calories. Boom! That’s more than half your daily calorie intake gone.