Actually I get odd looks when I go out to eat [given that i am FAT] because I can get filled up on a basic mcdonalds size burger and the small salad that most places consider their side salad. I am not fat because I hog around all day, but because of metabolic problems … the cute little $2.99 daily special sub from subway fills me up …
I keep getting asked if I have had some sort of bariatric operation and they are amazed when I tell them no, that I just dont have a huge appetite and have never really streched out my stomach. shrug I would love to be able to pack away a lot of food in a short time, but I have to eat slowly and let it move out of the stomach which lets out most buffets for me. MOst buffets have a 1 hour limit [or at least around here they do]
I’ve always been of the mind that there really is no such thing as “junk food”, but rather a “junk diet”. It’s a vital distinction, to my way of thinking.
When cutting 100 calories a day prevents weight gain, and 500 gets more serious wieght loss, it puts the 250 calories of their smallest burger into perspective. That little-ass burger takes you halfway to not losing weight, and has precious little to show for it.
Right after I posted my first item in this thread, I found McDonalds Bag A McMeal page, which is actually a really well-done little tool. Using it, I’ve found the following for a regular hamburger with nothing but the bun and grill seasoning (which, if you could get them to somehow leave it off, loses 90 milligrams of sodium):
My question is: If you buy ground beef at the store and grill it yourself, will the resulting burger be any more nutritious than the one you get from fast food places?
Do fast food burgers lose a lot of their nutritional value because of processing/freezing/etc?
Trying not to appear rude, I will ask if you know what those metabolic problems are? Are you saying that you can eat less than other people, and yet gain more weight? I don’t understand how that would work, biologically.
Well, for 12.5% of your calories, you get 17% of your saturated fat, 15% of your Iron, 10% of you calcium, 20% of your sodium (i put the 90mg back in) and 0% for Vitamins. For an adult male, you also get 19% of your protein (link). So its not great, but I don’t really think thats, as the OP asked, “the worst food in the world for your health”. I mean, the lack of vitamins isn’t good, but no food is a perfect source of all nutrients, and the side salad is right there on the menu too. And the fact that there’s protein in there makes it better than a lot of things kids eat.
A kid I knew in school was like that. He ate a single small salad for lunch every day, a very small dinner, and no breakfast. His whole family was overweight and they all ate about the same amount.
The whole “I have a slow metabolism!” thing is untrue for most people who are overweight, but for some it does appear to be. The one kid said that his doctor said that if we could share his metabolism around, famine would end in the world.
because McDonalds, more than any other fast food places i know, seem to spend alot of money on an ongoing marketing campaign aimed at kids/teens. so good luck with getting them to order only a plain hamburger and nothing else. (especially the upsized fries and drinks)
A hamburger in general is really not that bad for you. The meat is a good source of protein and the vegetables put on it can boost the vitamins, minerals, and fibers. Use mustard instead of mayonnaise and use either no or low-fat cheese for a dairy serving and you’ve got yourself quite a balanced meal.
Of course if you add 2 other patties of meat and cheese and load it with bacon and mayo it’s going to lose most of those benefits, but still… Many foods get bad hype. Just like many people avoid foods with any fat in it like the devil, not realizing that fat is something required by the body, and there are good fats found in various food items such as nuts.
Without a rigid food diary, claims like this are extremely suspect though. Its amazing how much food we can filter out of awareness without realising it, and Id wonder about his activity levels as well.
I like the junk diet comment, I agree that focussing on any single food is a mistake. I think beating on McD is as much an ideological declaration as its based on an analysis of thier food and marketting tactics though, they’re used as one of archetypical symbols for capitalism gone wrong.
He was relatively active (he played baseball and such.) And while I didn’t see him except for at school ever, I can say that while he was at school he really didn’t eat very much and never snacked. He sticks in my memory primarily for the reason that of all the overweight people I’ve met, he’s the only one I’ve met where what eating habits or lifestyle I could view didn’t match up with his size. Every other person I’ve met who was overweight pretty much was a big, “Ayup” when I saw them eating.
But true, even if you do have a slow metabolism, if you eat one salad a day and are overweight, then pretty obviously you’re still eating too much or excercising too little. Nothing wrong with eating half a salad every day.
The hamburgers I make at home are indeed more nutritious than the ones you get at McDonalds, but it has nothing to do with processing or freezing. It’s because I use very lean beef (grass-fed when I can get it, which supposedly contains Omega 3 fatty acids, but that may be more hype than anything) and whole-grain buns, I don’t salt the meat, and I put leaf lettuce and tomato slices on the burgers. I’m also told they taste much better than fast-food burgers.
Nevertheless, as everyone’s pointed out, a simple McDonald’s hamburger is not bad for you if you refrain from getting the fries and sugared drink that most people eat with it. It’s certainly not “the worst food in the world for your health”.
Ok. I just would like to know how it works. How do those with slow metabolism save so much energy? Is there some molecular explanation? Or is it because they sit totally still all day, thus enabling the muscles to go into “energy saving mode”. Or what?
IANAD nor a nutritionist. But what a “metabolism” is, is marking down the whole processing plant of the body into a single word as I understand it. Or more specifically how much energy is processed to keep your body functioning.
As you gain weight, for instance, the amount of energy it takes to operate your body rises, so your body processes more energy for you. People who are overweight, in general, have a “fast” metabolism. This is a given as if it wasn’t so, people would continue gaining weight indefinitely (if you’re taking on more food than you can burn, you’re going to continue expanding.) It’s only because you body speeds up your metabolism that you stablise at a certain weight.
If your metabolism was “slower” than average, you’re going to gain weight until you hit a point where your metabolism speeds up to a point where you stabilise–just instead of it being at a healthy weight, it will be at a heavy one.
But essentially what it means by having a fast or slow metabolism is where your body is asking itself, “Should I store this? Or burn it?” If it’s slow, it pushes more food to the “store” side. I would have to imagine that this means the person has less energy just to go about their daily life. In some sense, they would have to eat more than they would want to to maintain a slim figure as otherwise they wouldn’t be getting enough energy to just go about their daily life. I would imagine they’ll never be long distance runners.
Of course, we have to assume this is a conventional hamburger and not the controversial and short-lived McStrychnine sandwich the company introduced in June of 1987.
Heh, on the rare occasion that I actually eat at McDonalds, I usually get a kids meal. I figured out at some point that those things are perfectly portioned for me (a 22 year old male just 5 pounds short of being overweight according to the Air Force weight charts). Usually the cheeseburger meal with fries and a diet coke. If I get chicken nuggets, it’s as an added treat if I feel like eating something fattening (as I do when I’m stressed out. Is that some kind of weird mis-cued survival instinct?), but they just don’t seem to work by themselves as the main course of a meal.
And of course, every time I see one of these threads, I feel obligated to mention the time where I ate at Whataburger almost every day for 3 months and lost 15-20 pounds (ordering a Whataburger Jr. and a diet coke, no fries or anything else, and watching everything I ate throughout the day).
On a sidebar, in response to the folks having troubles getting custom orders at McDonalds, and just to show that I encounter all the weird people it seems, there was one time I went to a McDonalds in Uvalde, Texas, and ordered the crispy chicken cobb salad with no bacon and light ranch dressing. They gave me a salad with the bacon. I took it back, asked for one without, they said “OK”, and a few minutes later, they handed me another salad… with bacon. At this point, I gave up, and decided to just pick around the bacon. I sat down, and just before I could open it, one of the McWorkers ran up, bacon-less salad in hand, and snatched the salad they had given me from the table, giving me the corrected order. This is, mind you, out of the ordinary in my experience with fast food (or even regular food, for that matter), but a story I like to tell.
There’s another option, which I think is mostly overlooked, and that is “should I excrete this undigested?” My skinny husband can literally identify every meal by the chunks of undigested food in his feces. Not just the corn skins and bits of carrot we all pass through, but cheese, meats and other things as well. There’s just no way his body is extracting all the calories mine is when we eat identical meals and have similar exercise levels and there’s all that FOOD left in his poop! And my feces, as I’m sure you’re dying to know, is minimal and uniformly smooth and brown (with the exception of corn, of course) - very thoroughly digested, in other words. I’ve steadily gained weight with a food diary and 900 calorie days for years on end. Why don’t I go to 700 calories? 'Cause fuck it, I like food.
