Inspired by SuperSize Me, a science teacher named John Cisna from Iowa decided to make himself the guinea pig in an experiment to see what would happen if he ate nothing but McDonald’s for 90 days. The trick being that instead of consuming everything on the menu like Morgan Spurlock did, Cisna stuck to a 2000 calorie per day diet — enlisting help from his students to to construct daily meals using McDonald’s online nutritional information.
After his success of losing 37 pounds in 90 days, Cisna scored a book deal and is apparently also working on a documentary about his findings. He told Iowa’s KCCI8 News back in January:
Cisna said a typical breakfast would be two egg white delights, a bowl of their maple oatmeal and a 1 percent milk. A salad for lunch would be followed by more traditional value meal at dinner.
“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,” he said.
The moral of this lesson isn’t to eat more at McDonald’s, Cisna said, 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,” he said.
Well, yes and no. While I’m no nutritionist: Yes, it’s common sense that the heart of any good diet plan comes down to eating balanced meals while monitoring your caloric intake. However, even the fact that McDonald’s itself discourages employees from eating McDonald’s food is probably a good indicator that you shouldn’t eat it for 90+ days straight. Any kind of restrictive or exclusive diet will eventually make you lose weight. People dropped a sh*t ton of weight in the early-mid aughts on the Atkin’s Diet but then again, a lot of people also had heart disease. People in the ’80s thought that pasta was a diet food as long as you didn’t eat any fat.
It’s now been over 180 days and Cisna has lost over 60 pounds. It’s unclear if he ended his McDonald’s diet after 90 days or is still heavily relying on the fast food chain. If he is still eating McDonald’s on the regular though, the plus side is that they probably won’t need to pump his body full of formaldehyde after he drops from a heart attack.
(Via Business Insider)