A man lost 17kg, and his cholesterol level dropped from 249 to 170, by eating exclusively at McDonald’s for 90 days. He ate everything: from Big Macs to salads to sundaes to shakes to quarter pounders. It’s the antithesis of Supersize Me, the pseudo-documentary of a man who did the same — with two crucial differences.
The first difference is that John Cisca — a science teacher in the Colo-Nesco School District in Ankeny, Iowa — didn’t eat like a pig. He ate 2000 calories per day. He also balanced the intake of nutrients based on the FDA’s reference daily intake tables by combining different items from the fast food chain’s menu:
So this isn’t something where you say ‘well he went to McDonalds and he only had the salads. No, I had the Big Macs, the quarter pounders with cheese. I had sundaes, I had ice cream cones.
The second difference is that Cisca started to walk 45 minutes a day, like any normal human being should do.
The results were impressive: his weight dropped from 127kg to 110kg. The overall cholesterol level went from 249 to 170, while his bad cholesterol dropped from 173 to 113.
The teacher — who turned his science experiment into a documentary for his students — says that “the moral of this lesson isn’t to eat more at McDonald’s, but to pay attention to your daily nutrition and what you eat:”
The point behind this documentary is, ‘Hey, it’s (a) choice. We all have choices. It’s our choices that make us fat not McDonald’s.
It’s a good and perfectly logical point: if the amount of calories you ingest is inferior to what you use every day, you will lose weight regardless of your restaurant choice. And if you have a balanced diet, you will have all the nutrients you need no matter where you eat.
So don’t blame McDonald’s. Blame yourself if you gain weight. If you eat like a pig — like the Supersize Me guy — you will be fat like a pig no matter where you eat.