Supersize Me
Have you heard about this movie? It is a documentary, and you might think “Oh YAAWWWWWWNNN” but this one really kept going. I love visiting our son; I learn SO much.
The creator of this movie decides that for one month, he will eat every meal, three meals a day, at McDonald’s. And he has to try every entry on the menu at least once. And if the employees ask him to super-size, he has to do it. It appeared that he also made a rule for himself that he had to finish every meal. I don’t know how he did it.
Before he does this, he visits three doctors, a cardiologist, a gastroentrologist and . . .hmmmm, maybe an internal medicine specialist. He has health care professionals who will do blood readings every week and weigh him in. He starts at 185 lbs and very low body fat, and his cholesterol and triglicerides are to die for – excellent readings. His girlfriend is a vegan chef, so he has been eating beautiful meals, but not a lot of meat. (He is not a vegetarian.)
We watch him eat many of the meals. On the third day, his system rebels, as he is trying to finish, I think, a double quarter pounder, and he vomits. It isn’t pretty. At one point, his girlfriend says he has lost his sex drive, and has far less energy than before.
At the end of the first week, his weight has gone up to 203 – 12 lbs in one week! Worse, his cholesterol is rising rapidly. The second week, he is feeling sick and the doctor says he is developing a fatty liver, from digesting all the fats and sugars he is eating.
At the end of the month, he has gained 25 lbs, his system is in total rebellion against all the fats and sugars, and the doctors have warned him that he must stop now to reverse the damage.
Threaded through this adventure are sides, where we learn how much sugar the supersized drinks contain, and that even the SALADS at McDonalds have sugar in them. The calorie count for one of the salads exceeded that for the Big Mac!
I have to admit, there is nothing like a fast food hamburger every now and then – maybe once every six months or so – but this movie is a must see if you are eating at a fast food restaurant even once a week. The “food” they are serving is so processed, it barely qualifies as food.
The man who conducted this experiment went on a vegan diet for a while when he finished, and it took 8 weeks for his blood readings to return to normal, and 9 MONTHS for him to lose all the weight he had gained.
This was a fascinating movie, and a must see if we want to counter the rising tide of obesity spreading around the world. If it were an illness, people would be mobilized. As it stands, obesity is going to kill more people every year than smoking. The narrator says this is going to be the first generation of young people whose lives will be shorter than their parents, thanks to fast food. See this movie! Take your children!
There is a post script, and another reason I love this movie. As we were watching, my son said “Mom, thank you for cooking all those dinners for me as I was growing up.” He and his wife are very exercise and diet conscious, and I am proud to say, they live very conscientiously, trying to recycle, trying to eat fewer processed foods. What a gift that “thank-you” was!
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i loved that movie.
the same guy has a tv show now called 30 days which is based on a similar principle. basically they take people out of their element and put them into a completely opposite environment for 30 days and document it.
so they sent athiests to live with evangelicals, a anti-immigration hispanic with illegals, and my favourite which was a white christian guy who went to live in an asian muslim house for 30 days.
heres a link :
http://www.tv.com/30-days/show/36402/summary.html
and i there are a couple episodes on google video.
I stopped eating junk food a while ago (3 months) , it was tough at the begining considering i thrived on that stuff. but now without going on diet, i lost 7 kilograms and feel a looot better about myself… So inshalla fast food no more for me !!
I’m slightly underweight, and I think one of the main reasons is that i don’t eat fast food. I want to gain weight, but I don’t want to do it with fast food even though that’s the easiest way. I’d rather stay skinny!
HOW COME YOU NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT BEFORE? IT’S AND OLD ONE, BUT A VERY GOOD ONE AT THE SAME TIME.
I saw that movie on Showtime here in Kuwait. After the chicken nuggets part..I stopped having nuggets..well sort of lol
The wife & I decided to make next month our Vegan Month and she wants to see if I can handle living without meat for all of August *rawr!*.
I have seen this movie back when I was in college. Back then we lived on fast food. Everything my friends and I devoured for a period of almost 5 years was some form of fast food or another. My college years were my skinniest years.
Lately I have managed to gain a few pounds. For the past two weeks I have been having nothing but junk food. I already lost two kilos.
I don’t think I am normal :S
Skunk! I saw that clip! Little Diamond sent it to me, a friend had sent it to her, and oh, how we laughed! That man who was sent to live with the Moslem family learned SO MUCH! He came away a different person! Do you remember at the end, he was even praying in the mosque? It is such a cool show, such an extraordinary concept. And it works!
Abdulaziz – MABRUK! Now I wish I ate fast food so I could stop and lose 7 kilos without dieting!
Enigma – Studies show that underweight people live the longest. YOU are blessed.
LuLu – I live in a specialized world, I read books, I have my projects and I do watch movies, TV, but I am not always so current. My son helps keep me informed, thanks be to God!
R – you can always tell when a man’s wife loves him – she tries to make sure he will live a LONG time by helping him eat good foods. Mabruk, my friend. When I saw the “last supper” his vegan girlfriend had fixed – artichokes, a nutty looking something and quiche – I would go vegan in a heartbeat if all food looked that good, that appealing. Let us know how it goes!
Kinan – oh, sweetie, be careful. Your body won’t always take such good care of you, and one day you will wake up with a GUT and say “where did that come from???” I think you are normal, just normal with great genes.
Loved that movie – but it was scary to me, largely wondering what kind of person would DO that to themselves on purpose, for a movie?! The food was almost secondary, it was the psych aspect that captured me. Was this ambition run amok? He was willing to jeopardize his life for a Micky-D exposure? Admittedly, as awful as it was to watch, it was like that proverbial car wreck – can’t turn away, but didn’t scare me enough to change my ways…. LOL! I make my own choices. And don’t get me started on how irritated I am about the Trans-Fat ban here in Washington (King County), a la NYC. Food police. How far does this go?!