Supersize Me

Caught this early one morning on cable. Jean had told me a little about it.

I was pretty sure beforehand that he had taken the idea to the extreme for this documentary. It turns out it was even more so than I thought. Not only did he eat only McDonald's for the entire month, but he also restricted himself from getting any exercise during that entire time. Even more than just no extra exercise, but changing his life so that he didn't even walk around much.

So. A lot more food than he normally eats, and a lot less exercise than he usually gets. Hmm, I wonder what will happen. *rolls eyes*

The extent to which his body did change is fascinating. I wonder how long it would have stayed like that. I wonder if it would have ended up finding a new balance that was healthier than how it responded to the sudden shock. Especially if he had allowed himself to exercise.

Part of his opening was that he was testing McDonald's statement that a person could have a healthy diet if eating only at McDonald's. But, again, he took this to an extreme that was purposefully unhealthy. He didn't set out to try to find a healthy diet. Instead, he chose to impose a rule that he try everything on the menu by the end of the 30 days. He imposed a rule that he had to eat three meals a day. He imposed a rule that he must super-size the meal if asked.

At no point did he say anything about sticking to the salad bar for awhile to see what effect that would have. He made no attempt whatsoever to balance his diet. So his experiment was completely inapplicable to McDonald's statement about being able to eat healthy on their menu.

Granted, it would be difficult. I know that my usual order, a quarter pounder with cheese, a six-piece nugget, fries and a Coke is pretty awful. And I used to eat that (or the Wendy's or KFC or Long John Sliver's equivelant) a lot when I had spare money. At one point my weight had crept up to 205, (I'm six feet tall) I'm sure partly because of that. But it didn't take a huge change in my diet to bring my weight back down. I did start exercising substantially more, though. I had been pretty sedentary prior to that.

It was mildly interesting how rarely he was asked to super-size his meal. I think it was 16 times out of 90 meals. One that they showed was a super-sized double quarter pounder meal. That's a hell of a lot of food. And it turned out to be more than he could handle.

On Mighty's Brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Rental.  There was some actually interesting science that came out of this experiment. But he did take it to an extreme.

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