The Present Age

I just read the following story on msn.co.uk:

"Virginia man loses nearly 80 pounds in 6 months by eating at McDonald's every day

A Virginia man lost about 80 pounds (36 kilograms) in six months by eating nearly every meal at McDonald's. Not Big Macs, french fries and chocolate shakes. Mostly salads, wraps and apple dippers without the caramel sauce. Chris Coleson tipped the scales at 278 pounds (126 kilograms) in December. The 5-foot-8 (1.7 meters) Coleson now weighs 199 pounds (90 kilograms) and his waist size has dropped from 50 inches (127 centimeters) to 36 inches (91 centimeters). The 42-year-old businessman from Quinton says he chose McDonald's because it's convenient.

Coleson says his goal is to get back to the 185 pounds (84 kilograms) he weighed when he married Tricia Summer ten years ago."

That, my friends, is some spectacular bullshit. It is a fact that McDonald's salads contain more fat than their burgers - all you need to do is check the nutritional information on their website. Which, because I apparently have nothing better to do with my time, I did.

A double cheeseburger contains 440 calories and 23 grams of fat. The exhaustively-named Premium Bacon Ranch Salad with Crispy Chicken contains (once you add the salad dressing, which their website doesn't as standard) 470 calories and 26 grams of fat. Even the healthiest salad combination contains 340 calories and 13 grams of fat, both of which are considerably higher than the standard hamburger (at 250 cals and 9g of fat). Admittedly, neither quite reach the levels of a Big Mac, which has 540 calories and 29g of fat (45% of your RDA). But I would hardly call it the cornerstone of a healthy diet, much less one which would facilitate losing 6kg a month for 6 consecutive months. And whilst I'm at it, their wraps are hardly a picture of nutritional value either.

Leaving that aside for a moment, what a strangely written article. Is this what passes for prose on the internet? Sentence fragments. And. A general lack of coherence. And why, exactly, should anyone care that his goal is to get back to the 185lbs he weighed when he married Tricia Summer (whoever the hell she is)?


I'm enjoying the post-Irish vote Lisbon Treaty squabbling taking place at the moment. At least in the Czech Republic we have one voice of sanity and common sense.

Songs for the Deaf: 'Feed the Animals' - Girl Talk (not as good as I'd hoped, but anything that samples Temple of the Dog's 'Hunger Strike' and Ace of Base in the same track is fine by me); 'One-Armed Scissor' - At The Drive-In; 'Tired of Sex' - Weezer

Quote of the Day: "The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe it. - T. W. Adorno, 'The Schema of Mass Culture' (my goodness, what would he have made of all of this?)