Supersize Jimmy

Just saw a great documentary, "Fat Head", where the guy goes on a fast-food-only diet for 30 days.  He actually manages to lose a lot of weight (12 pounds). This documentary is a direct jab at "Supersize Me" where a guy goes on a McDonald's diet for 30 days and gains a ton of weight.  Well... 25 pounds to be precise.

In both documentaries, they go to doctors before and afterwards and the doctors verify that weight wasn't just gained or lost, but that basic measures of health corresponded.

I have always had trouble with Supersize Me, and not just for the guy's child-molester fu manchu mustache. 

The first problem I had with it was that he drank gigantic full-sugar (or corn syrup) sodas.  In fact, I sorta wonder if towards the end, he was starting to panic when his weight-gain plateaued and his numbers started to improve.  Because, it appears that he wanted a milkshake with pretty much every meal in week 3 and beyond.  Can't say for sure:  he doesn't provide the public with his food diary.  Set aside the idea of drinking 3 servings of ice cream with every meal, and let's talk about sugary soda.

McDonald's didn't invent soda with sugar in it.  In fact, you can buy soda with sugar in it nearly anywhere.  McDonald's wasn't even the first place where you could buy a big one.  Those of us who are a little older can remember when the 32 ounce big gulp from 7-11 was the cultural sign for sugared beverage excess.  Today, 32 ounces is considered a pretty pedestrian size.  The big drinks I get at McDonalds are usually in excess of 40 ounces.

So, I don't think you can lay the calories from the sodas at McDonald's door.  Roughly speaking, a can of sugary soda is about 200 calories.  A big McDonald's drink is equivalent to 3 or 4 of them.  So, if you got a big drink, 3 times a day, you could literally be drinking about 2,000 calories in beverages, alone.  Not only is this common sense, but one of his technical experts in the movie flat-out tells him to stop drinking his calories and, at the very least, drink water or some other non-caloric beverage to add some sanity to his diet.

2,000 calories, times 30 days is 60,000 calories.  If the math is right (and in this case, the 3,500 calories = 1 pound isn't that good as far as explaining weight loss or gain, but I'll go into that in a minute), then his beverages, alone, should have accounted for almost 20 pounds of weight gain.

During the documentary, he gained 25 pounds.  Again, the math is wonky on this, and I'll go into that in a bit, but basically, the bulk of his weight gain might have been avoided if he did everything the same, but ordered diet coke instead of coke. 

The second problem I have with Supersize Me is that the guy is just a giant P***Y.  I ate pretty much that exact diet.  Not for a month, but probably for something like 11 years.  Seriously.  From about 1987, when I got out of the Army, until about 1998 when I started training for my first marathon. 

I wasn't the picture of health.  I'll admit that.  I gained weight.  I'll admit that.  I probably weighed about 190-ish when I got out of the Army.  I ballooned up to about 225 at one point.  So, literally, over the course of 11 years, I gained somewhere on order of 30 to 35 pounds.  That's 3 pounds per year.

During the first 3 years of that period, I also consumed at least a six pack a day of full-sugar soda, too.  I switched to diet because I noticed some weight gain. 

Also note that we're talking about the period of time where I went from being 21 years old to being 32 years old.  It's not that unusual to gain weight during this time.

I'm not saying that my weight gain was due to just getting older.  I mean, what, maybe 5 pounds or so would be a natural and healthy weight gain during that period.

I gained weight because my diet wasn't very good and my physical activity was ridiculously little. 

Which brings me to problem #3 with Supersize Me:  he basically stopped getting physical activity.  In fact, he limited the amount he walked every day to less than he usually walked. 

So, okay, he's blaming McDonald's for the fact that he gained 25 pounds.  However, he drank sugary soda (which wasn't invented by McDonald's and is served or sold in pretty much any place that serves or sells food).  He ate McDonald's, three meals a day, every day.  He limited his physical movement.

Essentially, he deliberately ate the most ridiculous diet he could conceive.  In the end, he gained 25 pounds, which, he attributes to McDonald's.

The first warning bell that went off for me while watching this thing was that his girlfriend was a vegan chef.  In a way, he seemed to fit the profile of somebody who ate low calorie, low fat food.  He was very thin.  He did have high blood pressure, but frankly, those types of things are so frequently genetic and not related to anything behavioral that I can't really draw a conclusion there.

However, he does a fitness assessment at the start of the movie, and I couldn't help but notice that he appeared to do only about 35 push-ups.  Pushups have been an area of expertise for me ever since I got off the bus at Fort Dix for basic training.  For a dude, 35 push-ups is what would be considered "not many".  In fact, 35 push-ups, for a man, is what would be considered, "very weak and not in very good shape".  It would be indicative of a person who has a serious deficiency of upper body strength.

Which, in a way, affirms a little bit about what I suspect vegans end up becoming:  very thin people who aren't very strong.  Fine, they look good, and this guy's physique was something to be commended.   Being strong isn't that important in society, but I'm just mentioning this to illustrate that diets have consequences.  Good diets have good consequences.  Bad diets have bad ones.  However, even good diets, like a vegan diet (which I will admit, has more good going for it than bad), may have some negative consequences if you pursue it mindlessly.

He does say in the movie that he eats meat and has no intention of becoming a vegan.  However, living with a vegan chef probably influenced his diet a lot.  I know that if I lived with a vegan chef, I'd be eating a lot of vegan. 

The thing I notice when the movie starts is that this guy is impressively thin.  With his lack of strength, I do tend to wonder if he was maybe a tad underweight.  (Don't get me started on BMI.  That's such a total joke that anybody who believes it probably couldn't pass the requisite science to get a bachelor's degree in biology.)

If so, then eating a high-fat diet, especially abruptly, would probably be a huge shock to his system.  In the end of the movie, he even notes that during the last week of his insane "diet", his blood-analysis numbers actually improve.  He probably settled into something approximating a reasonable weight for himself and his body was no longer in shock.  It looks like he actually lost weight during the last week.

So, if you eat McDonald's, yes, you're going to get fat.  However, if you eat vegan, it's possible that any reasonably fit 12 year old will whip your ass in a fistfight because you can barely do 35 push-ups.  When I was in the Army, that was not enough to let you graduate basic training.  I believe that today, that's not enough to let you START basic training.  This guy is literally weaker than essentially every male in the Army. 

The fact that this guy's girlfriend was a vegan chef tells me that there may be the slight possibility that this guy had an agenda going into this thing.  I don't know how many vegans you've met, but despite the patchouli and incense hippie nature of the vegan vibe, some of them can be militant "meat is murder" type people sometimes.  They can be zealots and like many zealots, they don't care a lot about the means they use to advance their cause, so long as it advances their cause.

Now, he's not a vegan, but at one point in the movie, he talks to her and they mention how they hate the system that produces food the way it does or somesuch.  This is obviously a topic of conversation in their household and something they both believe in.  (The details aren't that obvious in the movie, but it is clear tht they both have a problem with the food industry.  I'm not talking about McDonald's when I say "the food industry".  I mean, the industry that produces food that's not vegan.)

So, bottom line, I don't like the guy.  I think he had an agenda and that agenda wasn't to try and find the truth, whatever the truth may be.  I think his conclusion is BS.  I want to find a reasonably fit 12 year old to whip his ass.

To me, the biggest problem I have with his conclusion is that nobody forces anybody to eat at McDonald's.  This is a point he acknowledges, but then he immediately says that McDonalds should stop selling super sized cokes and fries. 

What?  Whose business is that?  I really like being able to buy a bucket of diet coke for $1.  If McDonald's wants to sell it to me, what right does he or anybody else have to demand that they don't? 

Yes, I really do wish that healthy food choices were as convenient as a McDonald's drive thru.  I really, really do.

I just don't see how that's McDonald's problem.

One of my favorite dishes to get at take-out is Thai Pad Chicken noodles.  If I want them, I go to a place that sells them.  I don't berate McDonald's for not selling them. If you go to McDonald's, you know what they sell.  To me, being mad that McDonald's doesn't sell healthy food is like being mad that the Chevy dealer won't sell you a Honda or Lexus. 

To their credit, McDonalds sell salads and apple fries and all sorts of stuff that truly is better for you.  Guess what.  I don't buy that stuff.  Neither does almost anybody else.  McDonald's has to keep that stuff on the menu because some activist is going to make a big stink because they don't offer healthy choices, otherwise.

Perhaps the best quote I ever heard regarding cheeseburgers came from a dietician who said, "There is nothing wrong with eating a cheeseburger.  I just ate one.  The thing is, you can't eat it every day.  However, if you want to have one, and you have it once a week or once every two weeks, there is no harm from it at all."

People are people.  We overindulge.  We eat stuff that's bad for us.  Nobody is shutting down Godiva Chocolates.  They sell food that's horrible for you, and I sincerely doubt you could live on that for 30 days or 11 years, or really any amount of time. 

So, enough about Supersize Me.  There are fans of the documentary, and I'm not one of them.  The guy seems like the worst kind of activist who has decided that he knows the best way to live, and he wants to prevent anybody else from living any other way.

In fact, a note that I find particularly hilarious is that they say, basically, that McDonald's is evil for putting playgrounds in their restaurants.  One of the people interviewed says that in some neighborhoods, there are no other playgrounds.  Okay, let's accept that premise for a minute:  that the only place you can find a playground in some parts of the country is at McDonald's. 

In Fat Head, they point out that if nobody else is providing a playground for children, and McDonalds does, how does that make McDonald's bad? They're the only entity providing a place for kids to play and that makes them bad?  I don't get that line of logic at all.

So, on to Fat Head.

The counter-argument is coming from a guy who made "Fat Head".  I love this documentary.  Not just because the guy is infinitely more entertaining, infinitely less pompous and generally does a better job of presenting factual information.  I love it because he points out some problems with the way we try to lose weight.

This is the part where I admit that I struggle with my weight.  I don't think anybody who sees me would call me obese, but I clearly weigh more than I should and more than I want to. 

One thing I've always thought was a total crock was the calories in - calories out = weight gain or loss.

It doesn't work that way.  (If it did, then Supersize Me guy would have gained probably more like 50 or 60 pounds).  In fact, at the end of the movie, his weight basically plateaus at a tad over 200 pounds.  This is despite eating about 5,000 calories a day.  If calories were all that mattered, he should have gained over 10 pounds a week, every week, like he did in his first week. 

Now this is controversial.  You have guys who swear up and down that this is true and it works this way every time and you can't ignore math.

Personally, I think this theory, at best, illustrates a general principle, but doesn't do it with any precision, at all, and frequently doesn't explain what happens in the real world.

According to this theory, a calorie of fat, carbohydrate, or protien is treated exactly the same by your body.  That's simply not true and anybody who asserts this doesn't have the slightest clue as to what they're talking about.

I figure this is probably one of those things like when they tell an alcoholic that alcoholism is a disease.  It's not.  Or, if it is, it's the only disease that's instantly cured by making better decisions.  It's just that sometimes you can get a good result by shading the truth a little bit.

On the calories in - calories out side, yeah, it's better than nothing.  If you believe this, it's possible that it could help you make lifestyle changes that do, indeed, cause you to lose weight.

However, I've used it to try and lose weight and I never lose as much weight as the formula says I should.  I also notice that when I go off the wagon and eat whatever I want, I also don't gain as much weight as the formula says I should.

The documentary says that perhaps fat isn't the problem in diets.  Instead, that it's carbohydrates. 

To prove it, the guy eats at McDonald's, but avoids french fries.  He also gets diet soda, or iced tea, or lite lemonade, and avoids the sugary beverages.  He also doesn't eat 6 McDoubles at a sitting.  He eats, say, one Big Mac, and that's it.  (Note, he isn't going carb-free.  He isn't throwing away the bun from his hamburger.  He's just reducing the amount of total carbs he eats.)

Yeah, the diet has a little more to it than that, but not much.  That's about 90% of the diet. 

When I thought about it, I've heard people say that fat is good and that fat is bad.  I've heard people say that meat is good and that meat is bad.  I've heard people say vegetable oil is good and vegetable oil is bad. 

There's a lot of controversy in dietary circles. 

However, I honestly don't ever remember anybody who said that french fries are anything other than little dietary death sticks. 

So, if nothing else, the movie has gotten me to basically give up french fries for life.  I think this is going to be one of those quantum changes like giving up sugary soda.  There is so little consensus among dietary "experts" that when you find one thing that 100% of them agree on, you might want to consider embracing it.

In any event, this "eat the burger, not the fries" theory is actually borne out by an example from Supersize Me of a guy who eats 2 or 3 Big Macs a day, but has perfectly healthy weight (he's actually on the thin side) and great cholesterol.  Seriously, Supersize Me gives you an exact case study in a guy who is eating this diet and it is working.

Now, the rest of the deitary advice in the documentary is controversial to say the least.  However, I am wondering if perhaps I do need to incorporate more animal fats into a healthy diet.

He is working on some theories that are tangent to a lot of diets, the most notable and recent being paleo diets.  Basically, that we weren't meant to consume all these carbs.  That we were not meant to consume ANY vegetable oils or corn syrup.  Finally, that our diet was meant to include meat.  Yes, we did murder the meat to get it.  Usually this involved running after it, but that's getting into exercise, which is a different subject, altogether.

I also notice that (insert ominious government conspiracy theory music, here), our current obesity epidemic coincides with the timing of when everybody switched from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup.  Corn is heavily subsidized by the government, making it one of the cheapest foods in the country.  That means that when you drink a sugary soda, it's not generally sweetened by sugar, it's sweetened by corn syrup.  All these corn oils and stuff we cook with?  Probably has more to do with cheapness than goodness.

Now, we've basically been sold on the idea that corn stuff is better than other stuff, but now that I think about it, the logic appears to be:  corn is better than fatty beef.  Thus, corn oil is better than beef tallow. 

The more I think about it, the more I see that although this may be true, it also may not be.  We've simply been given no evidence at all.  Well... a little evidence, and frankly, corn products are turning up on the losing side more and more as the evidence comes in.

How does this all relate to me?  My dieting tends to be one of two varieties.  Option one:  eat anything, any time, gain weight.  Option two:  eat low-fat, calorie controlled, to lose the weight I gained with option one.

I'm actually going to try incorporating some more fat into option two.  That's actually a bit of a new twist and one of the things I've never tried before.

I'm also going to try focusing a little on eating fewer carbs.  I'm not going to eliminate them or go all Atkins or anything, though.

I figure that I can eat the equivalent of two slices of bread or a serving of rice, 3 meals a day, and still come in around 100 grams of carbs.

As a final note:  I should point out that I'm not advocating that anybody take up an all fast food diet, like I did for 11 years.  It wasn't good for me.  My health clearly didn't benefit from it.  I may have done lasting damage to my body.  It probably hastened the arrival of my first heart attack.  (Which has not happened, yet... knock on wood.)

I'm just saying that it wasn't as damaging as Supersize Me suggests.  I didn't gain 25 pounds a month.  In fact, that's probably in the ballpark of what the fast-food diet caused me to gain over the course of a decade, with the rest of the weight gain more than attributable to getting older and not exercising.

Now, you'll notice that I'm a little defensive about McDonald's here, and I'm going to give you a reason why.  When I got my first real job, I made less than $30,000 a year to start.  I made enough to pay rent, make my car payment, and meet my basic living needs and that was about it.  I tried to save maybe $50 a month, but usually a blown tire or some other calamity reduced my savings to zero on a pretty regular basis.

I wasn't poor.  I know what poverty looks like, and during a few months in my life, I got way too close to it for comfort.  However, I was struggling.

At that time, my meals consisted of a very, very large amount of the following:

1.  A chinese restaurant on the way home from work would sell me a pint of rice and a pint of sweet and sour soup for $2.  (Granted, this isn't fast-food per se, but it's exceedingly high in fat and carbs, making it pretty close to the nutritional value of fast-food.)

2.  McDonald's, at that time, had a combo called the "All American Hamburger Meal."  It was almost never on the menu.  You had to know it existed and ask for it.  You got a medium soft drink, small fries and a hamburger.  It cost $2 as well.

At the time, I was going to night school (a very, very demanding, research-oriented school) and was pursuing a certification.  So, saying I should have gone to farmer's markets and bought fresh produce and cooked it myself was just out of the question. 

At the time, I remember watching a TV documentary on people in prisons and they mentioned that they got 8 hours of recreational activity a week.  I thought, "I don't get 8 recreational hours a week and I haven't done anything wrong."

So, I was broke and I had no time.  McDonald's food wasn't good for me.  I know that.  I wasn't delusional.  But it was cheap and fast and kept me alive at a time when I had darned few other options. 

It kept me going until a point in my life where I had the money to buy better food.  To me, it was never a destination, but a way to get to a destination.

So, for somebody to say that McDonalds is evil, or they shouldn't be allowed to sell X, Y or Z, or that people who shop there are stupid, just rings of unnecessary paternalism to me. 

If I want a big mac value meal, I should be able to buy one.  If they want to supersize it, then I should be able to buy it if I want to.  Period. 

If I'm broke and the only option is to either get fat or to go hungry, guess what?  I'd rather get fat.

I'm just not a big fan of beating up on a business that sells a product that's perfectly legal, perfectly safe (if used reasonably) and that, at one point in my life, really helped me get through.  Yes, McDonald's food is dangerous, even deadly, if eaten improperly.

However, what's "improper"?  Both of these movies showed an example of guys who ate at McDonald's every day and were the picture of perfect health.  Fat Head even provides some scientific rationale to back it up.

I'm for people having all the information they need so they can make the best choices for them.  Then, I'm for government and activists and busybodies of all kinds to just butt out.