Man Loses 37 Pounds and Lowers Cholesterol Eating at McDonalds for 90 Days – A Lesson for Healthcare Providers

Have you heard about the Iowa science teacher who lost 37 pounds over the course of 90 days by eating only food from McDonalds? It’s hard to believe, but it’s instructive as to why your patients often fail to lose weight or keep it off.

Here’s a quick run down:

An Iowa science teacher, John Cisna, ate everything at McDonalds every day for 90 days: from Big Macs to salads to sundaes to shakes to quarter pounders. But something was very different than the story in the “SuperSize Me” documentary (where the participant gained a lot of weight).

The first difference is that Cisna didn’t pig out. He ate 2,000 calories per day and balanced the intake of nutrients based on the FDA’s reference daily intake tables by combining different items from the fast food chain’s menu.

So you can’t say “well he went to McDonalds and he only had the salads. No, he had the Big Macs, the quarter pounders with cheese, sundaes and ice cream cones.”

The second difference is that Cisna started to walk 45 minutes a day, like any normal human being should do.

The results: his weight dropped from 279 pounds to 242. The overall cholesterol level went from 249 to 170, while his bad cholesterol dropped from 173 to 113.

Should you put your clients on Cisna’s McDonald’s Diet? Certainly not. Losing weight by eating at a fast food chain for 90 days would not be considered good practice for anyone to recommend, much less as a medical weight loss solution. But the tale is instructive of a basic tenet that is often overlooked in fitness and unfortunately, even by health care providers engaged in preventive medicine.

Patients need to be told what to do. By sticking to a specific calorie amount, Cisna STILL lost weight, even while eating McDonalds.

Learn how to put patients on an automated, directed care path that works

Losing weight and changing lifestyle is about making good choices. So why do most people fail to make the good choices? Are they ignorant? Are they lazy? Well maybe in some cases but for the post part the problem is that they don’t really know what choices to make in a sea of information. Most people won’t find their elbow from their ankle if you leave them to figure out what to do in the information age.

Are you sending patients to internet websites to figure out what to do, eat, track? Do you tell patients they ought to lose weight but don’t give them exercise advice? Are you sending patients home with printed materials that they don’t read? Do you know what patients are actually doing between visits?

Patients need a specific plan for every day that keeps them on task and they need to actually be told, DAILY, what their plan for the day entails. The problem is most doctors don’t have the time, or want to spend the time, to give advice to patients everyday. How is that even possible?

Well, it’s possible if you realize that you don’t need a perfect plan, just a plan that has been demonstrated to work for a great number of people. And you don’t need to have 100 plans to choose from. Practices that offer their patients a laundry list of diets to choose from have patients that have just another excuse not to make up their minds.

Put your patients on a directed care path by specifying what they should do each and every day for the next 30, 60, 90 or even 120 days. If you’re wondering how that’s possible, be sure to check out the cloud-based patient intervention and directed care path platform at BodySite.  The platform literally automates nearly every aspect of follow up care in virtually any medical setting and is ideal for hundreds of structured medical protocols involving weight loss, anti-aging, preventive medicine and treatment plans before and after surgery and any medical procedure.

Stop leaving it up to patients to fill in the blanks. Even if you have a protocol, do your patents really “get” it when they leave the office? If you’re not sure, check out this video about a solution that ensures your patients not only “get” it, but get it daily, from you exactly as you want them to.