Even if you weren't into the documentary scene a little more than a decade ago, then there's still a very good chance you're familiar with Super Size Me, which came out in May of 2004. You got to see Morgan Spurlock eat a ton of McDonald's, but you also got to see how much it sucked for him, as his physical and emotional well-being deteriorated over the course of a month.
The documentary went a long way toward changing public perception of the fast food industry, bringing about a wave of health consciousness among the wider public, but in recent times, public perception of Spurlock's magnum opus has changed. Case in point, a follow-up documentary called Fat Head, which is... skeptical, to say the least.
Despite many attempts, nobody's been able to replicate the results of Super Size Me, and YouTuber Mike Jeavons was just one of the many people to try. Like that video up there, Jeavons was a little suspicious of the calorie intake that Morgan Spurlock claimed to gobble down every day. So, he wanted to try a version for himself.
"I thought the documentary was a little sensationalised. If you’re eating about 5,000 calories a day, then of course you’re going to put on weight and find your well-being affected. But I wanted to stick to the daily recommended amounts of things like calories, fat and salt, to see if I could have a balanced diet eating at just one outlet and still end up happy and full at the end of it all."
With his wife Grace by his side, Jeavons put together a plan to eat a healthy McDonald's diet for a week (March 21 to March 28), and although Grace did join in initially, that novelty quickly wore off. “We’re both big McDonald’s fans. We love going to the drive through, so at first I was really excited,” Jeavons said. “But that wore off very quickly.”
While breakfast didn't really prove much of an obstacle to Jeavons' own version of Super Size Me, lunch proved to be a little bit harder, as he explained.
"I knew I’d be having a big burger for dinner, so I wanted to stick to something like a salad or wrap,” he said. “But I’d get these major energy slumps afterwards. Then, by the time I had dinner, I’d feel almost euphoric afterwards. It was like a drug. I had a strange relationship with food that week. It was an odd mix of really not wanting to eat more of the same, but also looking forward to my next burger."
By the end of the week, Jeavons was having stomach problems, and had begun to eye up his wife's home-cooked meals with an envious eye, but weirdly enough, he'd actually lost weight by the time the experiment was over, to the tune of five pounds in seven days.
"People think it’s great, and are asking what I’m going to do next," Jeavons said, adding that he'd had a ton of positive feedback since he carried out the experiment. “I’ve had a few comments saying they wish I’d pushed it further and done a month, like the real Super Size Me, but that’s been done. You can’t please everyone."
Well, there you have it. Mike Jeavons says that this has proven to him that if he needed to, he could definitely go for a week exclusively eating McDonald's. That being said, he doesn't really want to do that now. He's kind of sick of burgers, I suppose.