I Am What I Chew

I’ve been slowly slipping off the wagon.  First it was pizza, then it was Taco Bell, then the mother of all fast food: a quarter pounder with cheese and large fries.

Yesterday, I woke up feeling like total crap and for some reason, I didn’t make the connection between the junk I was eating and the junky way I felt.

Hey, we all need to keep re-learning the same stuff, right?

So, last night I downloaded “SuperSize Me” from Netflix.  I sat horrified as the story unfolded about what happened to the filmmaker’s body when he embarked on a month-long McBinge — eating nothing but McDonald’s, three times a day.

The person lolling about on the couch, too tired and depressed to get up and go to bed, was instantly recognizable.  It was me.

The scariest part of the movie talked about addiction.  The high-fat diet actually makes you crave more of the greasy stuff and provides a high when consuming it. Worse, McDonald’s knows it.  It’s engineered that way.

After nearly destroying his health, the hero goes back to his organic vegan lifestyle (his girlfriend is a chef).  It takes months to lose the weight (25 pounds) and the ill effects (high cholesterol, liver damage, vitamin deficiency) that came with his 30-day McDiet.

What he willingly did to himself, I (and millions of others) unconsciously do to our bodies every day.

I will never again see the golden arches as the gateway to fun.  Beyond them lies the grave.