People Lose Weight Eating at McDonalds

A Richmond businessman lost 86 pounds eating only at McDonald’s.  Former CEI adjunct scholar Soso Whaley lost 18 pounds over the course of 60 days of eating McDonald’s food, citing the “controlled portion sizes” of McDonald’s standardized menu as being very helpful in enabling her to lose weight.

Other people lose weight at McDonald’s without even trying.  In Summer 1988, I lost ten pounds while working at McDonald’s for about 10 weeks.  The food was free to me as an employee, so I ate a lot of it, especially Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, and Chicken McNuggets.  My calories consisted of roughly 85 percent McDonalds’ food and 15 percent milk and orange juice consumed at home (I worked at McDonald’s 7 days a week, for about 4 hours per day, and made a point of eating as much as I could before, during, and after my shift).  I didn’t try to lose weight (since I wasn’t fat to begin with), but I did anyway.  (Maybe I lost weight as a result of the exercise I got cleaning the bathrooms, dining room, and grill area of the restaurant, and emptying all the trashcans — it was my assigned task to empty all the trash cans and take all the trash from the back of the restaurant to the trash dumpster for the mall in which the restaurant was located).

The experiences of people who lose weight while eating at McDonald’s call into question the claims of Morgan Spurlock, whose film “Super Size Me” suggests that McDonald’s is somehow to blame for rising obesity rates.