Dieting Secret Revealed

In the documentary Super Size Me, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald’s food for thirty days. The film is a platform to raise awareness about our obesity epidemic, the nutritional issues associated with fast food, and how corporations are profiting from shoving nothing but junk down our fry-holes.

I like the movie. Yes, I understand it was contrived. I know there are issues with it. But I still like it. I’m not anti-McDonald’s—not by a long-shot. (You all know that by now, as does the drive-thru person who handed me the double cheeseburger and large fries on Sunday.) That said, I do have a slight problem with his methods. I really don’t think eating 5,000 calories a day of any kind of food “proves” anything. He ate too much food and gained twenty-four pounds in thirty days.

So what’s this have to do with my big dieting secret? Well, let’s now turn our attention to one Daniel Fisher. Daniel was a fast food junkie. In a Super Size Me twist, he decided to eat at a local, organic burger joint for thirty days. I don’t know exactly what he ate because none of the articles I found explicitly said so. I assume it was smaller portions and organic versions of the burgers he was already eating. Plus salads. The results? He lost twenty-three pounds in thirty days and his cholesterol dropped from 285 to 166.

That’s impressive.

So obviously this means if you eat a McDonald’s burger, you’ll get fat and if you eat a locally-grown organic burger, you’ll lose weight, right? Well of course not. The real answer also happens to be our big dieting secret: if you eat more calories than you need, you’ll gain weight; if you eat fewer, you’ll lose.

Wow.

So why is it so hard to lose weight if the mechanics are so simple? Well, as I’ve pointed out so many times before, it’s because of the evil little elves that sneak into our rooms at night and feed us Hostess Twinkies intravenously. Nothing else can explain it. Or wait, I do have one other crazy explanation: biology. We’re living, breathing, biological creatures that have a built-in motivation to stay alive. One major component to stayin’ alive isn’t disco, but—get this—eating. For the past few thousand years, our species has relentlessly pursued technology to make our lives easier. The net result for most of us today is a world where we stay extraordinarily healthy, live extremely long, and have surrounded ourselves with more food than King Tut could himself could have ever dreamed of.

It’s easy to blame the big, evil, unhealthy corporations for making it so hard to lose weight, but they’re just a product of that aforementioned relentless march of progress. It’s easy to swing the other way and blame ourselves for lack of willpower and the ability to “just say no!” But really, when you get right down to it, we have ten times as much food as we’ll ever need and a biological drive to eat as much as we can whenever we can.

What a winning combination.

The real secret to weight loss? Well, that’s easy. Just move to an uncharted island and live off coconuts and crab forever. Or at least until The Professor figures out a way to get you home before Gilligan screws it up again.