Fast Food Lovers Take Note: The McDonald’s Only Diet Works!

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock created quite a controversy when he released "Super Size Me," the story of his personal journey and the results of eating only McDonald’s food. By eating nothing but McDonald’s for all three meals of the day, Spurlock put on 30 pounds and watched his health deteriorate as he consumed 5,000 calories a day. Although his documentary was hailed by some as a testament to the corporate influence of fast-food giants in causing people to eat improperly, many people scoffed at his results, saying that his menu choices were what caused his disastrous results, not the portion sizes he ate.

Inspired by Spurlock’s documentary, Merab Morgan of Raleigh, North Carolina, decided she would try her own fast-food-only diet. A construction worker and mother of two, Morgan devised a plan to eat only at McDonald’s for 90 days. She believed that Spurlock’s documentary had unfairly targeted McDonald’s, and had made it seem as though overweight people were helpless victims of an oppressive calorie-wielding corporate giant. Instead, Morgan believes, people are responsible for the food choices they make, and restaurants aren’t responsible for those choices. So the problem with a McDonald’s-only diet doesn’t lie in the menu items McDonald’s serves, but rather in the choices a person makes from that menu. To prove her point, Morgan set out to follow the same path Spurlock followed, eating only at McDonald’s for 90 days. But instead of gaining weight, she lost 37 pounds. "It feels great," she said. "Because the truth of the matter is that beauty is power, and if you're fat, or you’re overweight, then people don't really take you seriously."

Morgan is proud of her success, not only because of her weight loss but also because of her belief that Spurlock’s approach was misguided. "I thought it's two birds with one stone—to lose weight and to prove a point for the little fat people," Morgan said. "Just because they accidentally put an apple pie in my bag instead of my apple dippers doesn't mean I'm going to say, 'Oh, I can eat the apple pie.'" She used information from the McDonald’s website to create meal plans for herself containing no more than 1,400 calories a day, as opposed to Spurlock’s 5,000. Her usual choices were burgers and salads, and ate French fries only twice. Spurlock, on the other hand, ate every menu item at least once, and many of them multiple times.

Other people across the country have devised their own fast-food only diets to prove Spurlock wrong. One woman even went so far as to film an opposing viewpoint of a McDonald’s-only diet. Soso Whaley, of Kensington, New Hampshire, chronicled her weight loss adventure in "Me and Mickey D." She spent three 30-day periods on the diet, eating 2,000 calories a day at McDonald’s, and her weight dropped from 175 pounds to 138 pounds. "I had to think about what I was eating," Whaley said. "I couldn't just walk in there and say 'I'll take a cinnamon bun and a Diet Coke.' I know a lot of people are really turned off by the whole thought of monitoring what they are eating, but that's part of the problem."

Not surprisingly, Spurlock is keeping mum about the successes of Morgan and Whaley or the many other McDieters whose results have been starkly opposite from his. Apparently he is too busy with his new TV show on the FX network, a spinoff from his surprise-hit movie. As for Morgan, she hasn’t decided yet whether she wants to stick with her unusual diet plan in order to reach her goal weight of 150 pounds. But while she’s thinking about it, she has a suggestion for McDonald’s to consider. "If I could suggest anything to McDonald's, I would suggest the McMargarita," Morgan said. "Dine-in only, of course."