shocking details on things I used to eat all the time

When I got really fat in my late 30's and early 40's I didn't really see it coming. It's not like you just wake up one day and you are fat, it takes years to get to that point.

For me the de-evolution to fatdom was something that happened gradually and it would only be pointed out to me by people who don't try to spare my feelings (Thai people are like this -very blunt) and hadn't seen me in a while. For me, the change happened so slowly that I didn't even realize it was going on.

I was always athletic and maintained a very good metabolism well into my early 30's that helped in countering most of the bad things I did to myself via consumption. I had dieted very rarely at any real point in my life and most of those diets were misguided anyway such as that time in the 90's where everything was "fat free" but absolutely loaded with carbs.

Anyway, I kind of just ate whatever I felt like and this had no impact on my body for quite some time in my life. The other day though, I was just reflecting on what a normal meal would have been like for me and decided to dig into what sort of caloric mess I was regularly getting myself into back in the days of me not caring.

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I had a traveling job so while I did maintain an apartment in a city, I didn't exactly stock the kitchen since I was 75% on the road. My meals would normally consist of drive thru windows and one of my favorite things was the McDonalds McGriddle. This is an absolutely delicious breakfast sandwich and it was so cheap that I felt like I was losing money if I didn't buy it. It came with a sausage and egg pancake muffin sort of thing and two hash brown triangles. The coffee was just plain black coffee so I'm not even going to factor that in but here is the nutritional breakdown of my morning meal.

The McGriddle sandwich on its own is 430 calories and 42 grams of carbs. Once you add in the deep friend hash browns this jumps up to nearly 695 calories. Now McDonalds makes some excuses as to how this is not a huge amount of carbs and to some degree they are actually correct in a manipulated sort of way. The overall carbohydrate value of this is 22% of the entire days allotment but here's another factor that they won't tell you. your carbohydrate load for the day is not supposed to be chemicals, pancakes, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar. When the FDA or HHS or whoever is involved in these daily allotments of various nutritional elements are determining these numbers talks about carbs, they are lumping natural carbs, such as the kind you would find in a banana, in the same category as man-made slop like fructose. They justify this in a sort of chemical way in that your body breaks them down in the same capacity and this is also true. They kind of glance over the fact that 60 grams of McGriddle carbs is not at all the same thing as 60 grams of carbs from eating fresh mango.

One of the major downsides of this drive-thru life was that even though that is a lot of calories for a breakfast, it was never enough food to actually get me through to lunch. My system just burned right through it because there isn't really any substance to this meal. There is virtually no nutrition in it and well, that wasn't something I even considered at that time.

I did a search using rather innocuous terminology to try to figure out the nutritional information about the McGriddle, and McDonalds themselves are behind almost every single link that is on the first page of a search so obviously, they are not going to talk trash about their own product. This is the lengths that a gigantic company will go to in order to keep their consumers in the dark by hiring a team of web designers and SEO people to make sure that actually finding that straight scoop on how unhealthy this food is, is going to be rather difficult information to figure out.

These days, in order for me to come even close to 700 calories for breakfast, I have to eat an enormous amount of food and let me tell you, I am full for a long time afterwards.

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_{I'm not going to lie.. it tastes REALLY good}

Of course we have to face the reality that my new diet of eating whole foods costs probably about 3 times as much as going to McDonalds does and that is a very big problem indeed and sadly one that is very unlikely to be resolved.

If youre eating 700 calories for a single meal, I feel as though it should be a meal of substance but yet, this meal has very little in the way of any actual nutrition and since it failed to keep my belly full, I would return to an absolutely ravenous lunchtime meal that was even worse for me than the breakfast was.

We'll get to that in a later episode but trust me, as the day goes on it becomes evident why it was that I managed to get up to nearly 250 lbs when I was at my worst. I was just fortunate I guess, because my irresponsible lifestyle was one that was always going to result in me gaining weight. Thankfully I realized the error of my ways and made a change before it was too late.