Sunday, June 18, 2006

July 1st will be McDonald's Day

July 1st will be McDonald's Day. What does that mean? I'll eat at McDonald's at least twice, probably 3 times that day. I'll do it to get it out of my system. After July 1st, I'll never eat at McDonald's again. How many people you know say "I can't remember the last time I've eaten at McDonald's!" Well, I currently can't remember, but I want to remember right down to the day that I last ate at McDonald's. The last day that I had a cigarette was January 4th, 2006 and I've gone nearly 6 months without a single puff. I've been tempted, but I won't smoke again. I want to do the same thing with McDonald's because it represents all of the fast food industry. Now, I'll still probably eat fast food because I occaisionally eat at Wendy's, Whataburger, Taco Bell, Taco Cabana, and Sonic from time to time, but it's maybe 2-3 times per month at most.

It's funny because I used to work at a McD's in high school. I was a damn good employee, too. I worked there for over a year and ofcourse I ate their food all the time. I was working 40 hours per week while going to school, still made straight A's, but all of my food was coming in the form of greasy burgers and fries. Man, when I was a teenager, my metabolism was through the roof and I ate a ton of food. I can't imagine what damage I did to my body that year and a half I worked there. I wouldn't even consider it now. I only have 1 more day of eating at McDonald's and then I'm done with it, hopefully forever.

3 comments:

mcoker said...

I don't get it... why stop eating mcdonalds b/c they represent the fast food industry if you're still going to eat food from the fast food industry? Not questioning the correctness of what you're doing or anything, just trying to understand your plight better.

Me said...

I understand your questioning. When you think of fast food and the evilness that comes with it, the first thing that pops in your head is McDonald's. You don't think about Wendy's, or Hardees or Burger King, you always think about McDonald's. They are the ones that all the others follow. I'm picking them as a figurehead for the fast food industry as a whole. Also, you don't hear many other people talk about how they haven't eaten Whataburger or Sonic in years, but you hear everyone talk about how long it has been since they've eaten at McD's.

I know it may sound hypocritical that I'm boycotting McD's, but still eating food from other fast food restaurants. On my trip to Houston last weekend to pick up my car, it was nearly impossible to find an exit that had decent food to eat. Even Subway which is somewhat healthier, was very sparce. I ended up eating at Whataburger and Wendy's during the trip. Yes, I could've prepared my own food for the trip and brought it in a cooler, like I'm sure you're going to do for BSLT, but I just didn't have the foresight to do that and that's a major pain anyways. I'm trying to cut down on fast food, but some days when I've had spaghetti for 3 days in a row I know that 2 junior cheeseburger deluxes from Wendy's for $2.14 will hit the spot nicely. And they have 720 calories which isn't great, but it isn't bad either for a dinner that costs under $3 and fills me up.

mcoker said...

I guess I get what you're saying, but I think the only reason people pick on McDonalds is 1) they're like the quintessential fast food joint and 2) "Super Size Me". Neither of which is necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion. I think morgan spurlock could have picked just about any fast food place or even established restaurants and gotten similar results. I suppose I see stuff like that as a "big picture" message, and isolating any individual company (ie, mcdonalds) and not all of them seems kinda pointless. But that's just me - i'm not saying what you're doing in pointless :-) I do think that the less fast food, the better, so even if it's just one place you're not going to, that's certainly better than nothing.

And FWIW, if you're interested... a couple of years ago, my ex-girlfriend and I used to eat fast food pretty much every day at lunch, and quasi-fast-food (taco cabana or something) for dinner about half the week. One day we just decided we weren't going to eat fast food for 30 days (with the exception of sandwich shops - and if we ate there, we'd get the "healthy" sandwiches). The first week or two was kinda weird. I got really sick of sandwiches, but after a few weeks, we started getting creative with different things to eat, and after a month we were like "wow, this is actually great". Spent less money, ate more of our own cooked foods, diversified our diet out some more (because we had to get creative instead of falling for our same staple fast food places all the time). It was pretty cool. I think it was since then that we have been able to say what you said above, where neither of us can remember the last time we had fast food.

 

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