He Ate Only McDonald’s Food for 90 Days — and Ended Up Losing Weight

After the 2004 documentary "Supersize Me," which featured a man who only ate McDonald's cuisine for a month, fast food got pretty bad grades after the filmmaker reported his health declined during filming.

John Cisna...is his "before" photo on the left or the right? (Image source: KCCI-TV)

But John Cisna of Ankeny, Iowa, a science teacher, took a different approach to the McDonald's experiment...with stunning results, KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa reported.

"I can eat any food at McDonald's (that) I want as long as I'm smart for the rest of the day with what I balance it out with," Cisna said.

With help from three of his high school students this past fall, Cisna endeavored to eat only McDonald's food. Breakfast, lunch and dinner...but with strict daily nutritional limitations of 2,000 calories and trying to stay close to the recommended dietary allowances for nutrients like carbohydrates, proteins, fat calories, cholesterol, KCCI reported.

Cisna told the owner of the local McDonald's franchise about his experiment, and he agreed to provide the food for free.

Cisna's students got involved by taking McDonald's online nutritional information to plan daily meals for their teacher, KCCI added.

Image source: KCCI-TV

What did he eat?

More from KCCI:

Cisna said a typical breakfast would be two egg white delights, a bowl of their maple oatmeal and a 1 percent milk.  A salad for lunch would be followed by more traditional value meal at dinner.

"So this isn't something where you say 'well he went to McDonalds and he only had the salads. No, I had the Big Macs, the quarter pounders with cheese. I had sundaes, I had ice cream cones," he said.

During the experiment, he also started walking 45 minutes a day. By the 90th day, Cisna reports he lost 37 pounds and his cholesterol dropped from 249 to 170.

The moral of this lesson isn't to eat more at McDonald's, Cisna said, but to pay attention to your daily nutrition and what you eat.

"The point behind this documentary is, ‘Hey, it's (a) choice. We all have choices. It's our choices that make us fat not McDonald's," he said.

KCCI noted that Cisna said he isn't surprised at the weight loss because he wasn't exercising or watching his calories before...but the big improvement in his blood now that he's capping his nutrients at the recommended daily levels is the big eye-opener.

Here's the report from KCCI:

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