Lost 37 pounds in 3 months from a McDonalds only diet

Buzzfeed reports:

John Cisna, a science teacher in Ankeny, Iowa, enlisted his students help him with an experiment: He wanted to see what happened if he only ate McDonald’s for three months.

Inspired by Super Size Me, Cisna planned to put together an amateur documentary about the process, KCCI reports.

Following a strict 2,000-calorie diet, Cisna’s students constructed meals for him using McDonald’s online nutritional information.

 They also tried to stay close to the recommended dietary allowances for carbohydrates, fat, proteins, and cholesterol.

Cisna didn’t heavily restrict himself; a typical breakfast would be two egg white McMuffins and a bowl of maple oatmeal, lunch would be salad, and dinner would be a value meal — like a cheeseburger and fries.

“So this isn’t something where you say ‘well he went to McDonald’s and he only had the salads’,” he said. “No, I had the Big Macs, the quarter pounders with cheese. I had sundaes, I had ice cream cones.”

In addition to watching his caloric intake, Cisna also began walking 45 minutes a day. …

When the experiment was over, Cisna had lost 37 pounds and brought his cholesterol down to 170 from 249.

His low-density lipoprotein, known as ‘bad cholesterol’, also dropped from 173 to 113. …

He added: “We all have choices. It’s our choices that make us fat, not McDonald’s.”

A useful experiment that dispels some of the hysteria over fast food. As Cisan said, it is your choices that make you fat, not McDonalds.

The walking he did every day would have accounted for only five pounds of the 37 pounds he lost. The reality is you can eat pretty much any food you want, so long as you keep portion sizes appropriate and you keep under the recommended daily intakes for calories, sugars, fats, carbs etc.

The well known super size me documentary had someone eating 5,000 calories a day of McDonalds food. If you ate 5,000 calories a day of any food, you’d gain weight.