Lose weight by eating every meal at McDonald’s

by philg

After a month traveling, I’ve concluded that the best way to lose weight is by eating every meal at McDonald’s.

Suppose that you go to a Whole Foods-style supermarket, at which all manner of incredibly delicious gourmet items are for sale. You spend $200 to stock the fridge. But really you ought to eat all the fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods while they are fresh. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Suppose that you go to a reasonably nice restaurant, costing $20-30 per person. The menu will list an incredibly tempting array of food. It all sounds so great that you order an appetizer and a main dish. You have a tough time deciding among the main dishes and you’re sad that you can’t order two. The appetizer is actually big enough that you are beginning to feel full when the main dish comes. The main dish is heroic in size, the kind of feast that Homer describes the heroes at Troy as having consumed. You’re not really all that hungry but you ordered it so you feel like you should eat at least half. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Eat at home or eat at a restaurant. Either way you get fat.

The solution is McDonald’s. If you can remember one piece of medical advice from my brother (“Don’t eat anything a caveman wouldn’t have eaten”), you skip the fries. For a beverage it is unsweetened iced tea or Diet Coke. So far, zero calories. All you need now is a sandwich. The bread isn’t really on the Atkins diet but otherwise a McDonald’s sandwich is vastly smaller and lower in calories than anything you’d get in an upscale restaurant. Best of all, the menu at McDonald’s won’t tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren’t all that delicious. If you’re really hungry they can taste pretty good but have you ever been sad that you couldn’t order both the Big Mac and the Quarter Pound with Cheese?

Market opportunity: write a book entitled “The McDonald’s Diet” that explains how to lose 5 lbs/week eating only in McDonald’s.

[This is not a completely original idea, of course.  Don Gorske has been at it for 30 years, coincidentally only a few miles from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the site of the big airplane convention where this idea began to take shape.]

43 thoughts on “Lose weight by eating every meal at McDonald’s”

  2. The salads aren’t that bad, get the Newman’s low cal dressing, and if they have free WiFi think of the fun you will have! Blogging from Mickie D’s!

  3. And, of course, the food is so incredibly disgusting you won’t eat it anyway —> starvation diet.

  5. When you get tired of that diet, you could try the ‘Eat only from 7-Eleven’ diet. This, for me, would probably be more effective ever since my husband implored me not to dart into 7-Eleven to grab a loaf of bread. “Everything in there has a weird 7-Eleven smell” he said. I ignored him and bought the bread. He was right though, the un-appetizing odour became immediatly noticible in that loaf of Wonder Italian ! I guess I never noticed that smell when consuming my breakfast in High School of 7-Eleven coffee and skittles (can you tell I’m a programmer). Walk in to your local 7-Eleven. Breathe deeply. What is that smell anyway ? Enquiring minds want to know.

  6. For a while I tried the “Eat every meal at Taco Bell” diet, but, well, we won’t go into how that worked out.

  7. Good thing you’re not a dietician. All restaurant food is bad for weight loss, including (especially) McDonald’s, not to mention the other health side-effects (high cholesterol, etc.). Cook your own food so you know what you’re eating and can count calories yourself. You don’t need to eat everything fresh, learn what keeps and what doesn’t. If you need help with that, go to Recipezaar (http://recipezaar.com) and get cooking advice, information and full nutrition facts for all your recipes.

    And you’ll save money too.

  8. Troy: Restaurant food is not bad for weight loss. Calories are bad for weight loss. If McDonald’s food doesn’t tempt you too much and you eat fewer calories you lose weight. And nothing could be simpler than counting calories at McDonald’s. They have the information posted in every restaurant and on their Web site. If you cook at home you’d have to weigh all the ingredients and measure exactly.

    As for high cholesterol, the Atkins diet doctors claim that high carbs and high weight are what drives up cholesterol. Their recipe for lower cholesterol is lots of animal fat, the exact opposite of what traditional diet advice has been. Not sure who is right on this one but personally my cholesterol fell quite a bit over the past two years (during which my girlfriend was cooking bacon and eggs every morning and steak every night; my previous diet was much higher in carbs).

  10. The reason why America is so fat and unhealthy is because too many people are following your McDonalds diet.

    As far as Atkins and his diet, I recommend everyone look into the other silly ideas he came up with that didn’t make it onto the jackets of his books.

    Witold
    http://www.witold.org

  11. Do you ever see thin people eating at McDonalds? Just the fact that the food from McD’s has probably been spit on, sweated on, dropped, and full of hair and bugs is enough for me to want to eat at home. If you’re dumb enough to buy more fruit and veggies at Whole Foods than you can eat in a week…well…then you deserve to eat McD’s. Stay out of Whole Foods. Us thin people don’t want to look at your fat butt in the isles anyways….

  13. The Whole Foods diet has it’s own merit because the stuff is so expensive there that you can’t afford to buy too much. If you have to eat out go to most upscale places ($50 per person and up) where the meals are not ‘heroic’ in size and you can’t afford an appetizer.

  14. The Atkins diet may appear to many to be “silly” but I can attest to its effectiveness. Today marks the end of the third week and I’ve lost nearly 20 pounds. And I’ve not rigorously adhered to it – though I have omitted high-carb items like bread, pasta, and potatos, I haven’t exactly toted a notebook around where I judiciously jotted down the carb consumption.

    Although overweight, my cholesterol was still borderline or under the recommended mark – I will get tested again to ensure other health barometers are OK.

    I’m getting sick of eating steak, eggs, and bacon though. And I miss coca-cola, which probably is the biggest factor in weight loss – drinking a six pack of coke per day, no doubt, is detrimental to your health.

    The McDonalds diet recommended isn’t bad if you toss one half of the bun and add a salad to the meal. And maybe add another hamburger patty or two… Other good restaurant choices are Chinese food (eat soup & stir fry dishes), Mexican food (burrito “bowl” and/or taco salad or a corn taco shell isn’t that high in carbs, but avoid flour tortillas), breakfast places (omelettes), and in pizza parlors, opt for chicken wings & lite beer w/extra celery sticks.

  15. i won’t eat at McDonald’s not because i necessarily dislike their food, but because i totally disagree with their practices. anyone who has read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser will understand what i’m talking about.

    i disagree with the notion of ‘fast food’ in general. people need to slow down and experience life, rather than always being in a hurry. personally, i want to taste my food, not just eat it.

  16. Another option: the “bhikkhu (Buddhist monk) diet.” Buddhist monks (and laypeople at certain times) eat nothing after noon, which gives one’s digestive system a chance to completely process one’s daily intake. (Seventh-Day Adventists recommend eating lightly in the evening, as well.) My own experience bears it out–eat your fill in the morning, eat a decent lunch around noon, and skip dinner, and you’ll lose weight. (Exercise is important, too.)

    There’s an article describing one woman’s experience with the “diet” in the current issue of Tricycle magazine.

  17. Ya, I read fast food nation too and that’s a good reason right there not to eat at McD’s. I also saw a horrid documentary on the CBC about the Chicken Industry. I was crying while watching all these Peta videos about what happens to male baby chicks that are useless because they aren’t egg layers. They basically get tossed live into a “paper shredder” or sent to a mink farm for mink food. (Good reason right there not to wear fur, but that’s a different blog). The whole thing just makes me ill, but when meat has been apart of your lifestyle since you were young it’s really hard to elminate that from your diet. Especially when your hungry.

  18. The McDonald’s diet will at least give you a good balence of America’s four basic food groups: Salt, Sugar, Grease and Chemicals.

  19. When you read through a list of comments and see that some people don’t leave their email address and some other people don’t leave their name, and then you get to the bottom and see that none of the boxes for input are marked as required, and so you type away for half an hour or so about people’s food dysfunctions and click submit, and then the page refreshes and your comment is not there, nor is it where you left it in the little box where you typed it, but a message tells you “Can’t post this comment because the email address is not a valid email address”, and there’s no ‘Back’ button at the top because all the buttons have been removed for reasons of aesthetics — well, you get kind of despondant and take a trip to the kitchen and come back with a 250g bag of Old Dutch ketchup flavour chips and eat the whole bloody lot knowing full well from past experiences that it will remove a layer from the inside of your mouth and tomorrow your shit will be bright red! Looking on the bright side, and the back of the pack, those chips contained 19% of my RDA of vitamin E!

    Philip, you’ve been distancing yourself lately from the old, creaky material within The Book, but could you please pass a copy along to Dave Winner the next time you have dinner with him? Cheers.

  20. The problem with a “McDonald’s diet” (if there were such a thing) and the Atkins diet is that you can’t maintain them over years. At some point someone is going to throw up into the daily breakfast pan of bacon & eggs. You’ll go mad craving some “forbidden” item. People were meant to eat food that hasn’t been refined too much, and here in Canada we’re all munching on pemmican. No, seriously, here in Canada, the G.I. Diet (Glycemic Index Diet) is scoring big successes for dieters. It’s based (as far as I can tell, I don’t pay attention to it, but my husband does) on the fact that certain foods convert more quickly & more easily into sugar in your blood, and thus contribute to weight increase. The idea is to eat lots of the food that converts very very slowly (and on Atkins, that’s what you’re doing all the time, but the G.I. Diet’s point is that you can’t keep it up over years, and that there are plenty of non-animal-based foods that have the same properties), eat some of the food that converts more quickly, and eat nearly never of the food that converts almost instantly. On that note, some white rice is better than others; pasta cooked al dente is better than really mushy cooked noodles, white bread is clearly out, and, as Philip noted re. McD’s muck, portion sizes matter. Atkins isn’t something you can maintain for years, nor would you want to. It’s gross.

  21. Well, to each their own. I found the Atkins diet, by far, the easiest to stick with — 12 years and going strong. But everyone is different. The Aktins diet is perfect for the meat eaters in our society (like me!). For those who crave pasta, I would recommend that they join Weight Watchers, a very successful diet program that has worked well for a number of people I know.

    The problem with the proposed McDonald’s Diet is that even a SINGLE Big Mac or Quarter Pounder with Cheese is LOADED with calories. But for those of us on the Atkins Diet, a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese makes for a decent meal if you throw away the bun. 🙂

  22. Ever wondered what the ancestors ate? Those who start the journey of discovery will be glad they did, not because there is a clear answer, but because there is mind-blowing insight awaiting along the track…Even without this I wouldn’t go to McDonald’s again, since it once threw my down after eating about 10 Hamburgers…

  23. If you have to eat out go to most upscale places ($50 per person and up) where the meals are not ‘heroic’ in size and you can’t afford an appetizer.

  25. Phil, losing 5 lbs is insignificant for someone of your size. For Jennifer Aniston, it might make a difference, but for someone who weighs 230 lbs or so like you, 5 lbs may have nothing to do with the diet. I wouldn’t make any scientific analysis based on such a small amount of change.

  26. Phil –
    There’s a guy in NY who’s tried exactly this (eating at McDonald’s every day for 30 days) and the results were NOT good. His name is Morgan Spurlock, and he’s made a movie about the experience, called
    “Super Size Me”.
    There’s a story in the NY Post for 1/22, try

    http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/16393.htm

  28. The mcdonalds diet works. You can lose weight by eating cheeseburgers and fries. Loosing weight comes down to calories. If you were to eat at mcdonalds and keep your calorie intake at a normal level, while eating a variety of foods, you would lose weight. Whether or not it would be healthy is another debate.

    And that super size me show is a joke. The guy didn’t just eat mcdonalds for 30 days, he also stops exercising and actually forces himself to take only a few thousand steps per day (as many as the typical american). The problem is, just because the typical american is too lazy to only take 3000 steps a day doesnt mean it’s mcdonalds fault they are fat.

    When I go to mcdonalds, the only fat people are guys in business suits. All the skinny people are young, and are active, and play sports. You always see those black skinny basketball players that live off of mcdonalds. Well, if they sat around and did butt fuck nothing and ate mcdonalds all day, they would get fat too, ANYONE would. So his movie proved nothing, other than what everyone else already knew.

    I bet if he had done that movie and ate mcdonalds like he did, but he had kept up his normal lifestyle, he wouldn’t have gained weight. Also, the health effects he suffered because of mcdonalds were rediculous, and don’t reflect mcdonalds one bit. Just because he had problems means nothing. There are tons of people who eat at mcdonalds every day of their lives (i’m one of them) who don’t suffer any of those immediate problems.

    But anyways, back to the point…. diet wise, mcdonalds will help you lose weight. But so will a snickers diet. Eat 8 snickers bars a day to stay under 2500 calories. Technically, you shoud lose weight.

  29. There is a website where Kevin O’Connor has lost 46.2 pounds eating only McDonalds and unlike Merab Morgan, he ate everything. Really cool website if you can figure out how to get to his daily pages. Some really funny scenes like his son at the McDonalds secret headquarters. Kevin also lost more than Merab Morgan in the first 90 days.

  30. There is a website where Kevin O’Connor has lost 46.2 pounds eating only McDonalds and unlike Merab Morgan, he ate everything. Really cool website if you can figure out how to get to his daily pages. Some really funny scenes like his son at the McDonalds secret headquarters. Kevin also lost more than Merab Morgan in the first 90 days.

  41. my best friend and I eat at Mcdonalds ALL time. like 1-2 times a day and I have LOST weight from eating there, and all i do everyday is sit on my butt at a computer. And my best friend also has lost weight there too . So this really does work, well for my best friend and I it does. So don’t knock it til you try it!

  43. I had been struggling for 2 years to lose weight…I only needed to lose 20lbs so I thought joining a gym and eating better would make it easy to lose weight so I begin my journey into workout land. For the next 4 years I worked out 4-5 days a week, ate more veggies and fruit, salads, lowered my sugar intake gave up sodas, drank plenty of water, switch from white bread to whole wheat then reduced bread intake all together, all the things nutrionist say to do, but I did not lose any weight. Of course my friends and other people I would see reguraly at the gym were losing weight. So I would ask them what they did for their weight loss and each would say all they did were the things I mentioned above. After all these years and without much weight loss…and I’m not exaggerating, when I started those 4 yrs of working out/eating better I weighed 150 with a BMI of 24% (I’m 5’4) and after 4 years I weighed 149 with a BMI of 23%. Every week I would weigh myself and the weight would stay exactly the same, never up nor down…it was just bizzare to me! And yes I had my thyroid checked, hormones, glucose, etc…I had REPEATED tests because I was just sure it was one of these causing no weight loss. So last year I remember sitting at dinner with friends, after ordering water to drink and of course looking at the menu to see what the healthiest choice was but really wanting a steak with a baked potato and I thought to myself “I give up” literally… I’m tired of eating healthy foods, drinking water, exercising my behind off all for nothing…oh I forgot to mention that during all this eating healthy and working out I also could not get my cholesterol levels to drop below 200, and even once it was 220…so I told myself that evening to order the steak, order a Dr. Pepper…and from that point on I ate WHAT ever I wanted…when I would go out to dinner and I had a craving for a certain food I would order that…I would constantly eat at fast food places especially the Big Mac at McDonald’s, I drink Dr P all the time, lowered my water intake…I even STOPPED exercising all together, cancelled my membership…now I did lower my portions, for example, half my hamburger instead of trying to eat it without one of the buns, 6 french fries and only half the soda. Also I was EVEN skipping breakfast…GUESS what… within 2 months I dropped 15lbs and down 2 sizes and my cholestrol went down to 160! I’ve been able to keep off the weight for a year now! Does anyone have any idea on how this worked?? I’m not complaining by no means just a bit surprised by the more unhealthy I eat the better my body feels and responds…things that make you go hmmm???

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