That's why when I have kids, every time we drive by a fast food place I'm going to punch my kid in the face.

I've been working over the last year or so to improve my diet. I used to eat a fair amount of fast food, and I continue to have fast food cravings from time to time. One of my goals in watching Super Size Me was to curb those cravings for a long, long time. I'm pretty sure it was successful (only time will tell for sure.)

Super Size Me is getting a lot of press for the stunt part of the movie; a guy eats nothing but McDonalds foods for a month. But it's actually a whole documentary about obesity, our diet as Americans, and fast food with the stunt part intertwined in it. This works really well, because while the documentary parts are good (if unremarkable) the stunt parts are the really powerful parts of this movie. But the stunt parts couldn't survive on their own, they need to be broken up, and the documentary works really well for that.

It was amazing to see what McDonalds food did to this guy's health (in fairness it wasn't just McDonalds, he also completely stopped exercising.) He had a hard time climbing stairs, his mood was terrible except when he was eating, his girlfriend complained about their sex life (fairly graphically on screen too, she was brave) and his doctors couldn't believe what was happening. His doctors actually started to seriously worry about his health and strongly suggested he stop the experiment after about 20 days, when he refused he just got a list of symptoms that would warrant an immediate trip to the nearest ER. Scary stuff.

What is perhaps more scary is while I was watching this whole thing and getting utterly disgusted with fast food I got a couple of fast food cravings. Those high sugar, high sodium foods are wired into my brain deeply enough that while my conscious is repulsed by them and the idea of what they mean to my body, my subconscious is doing a Homer Simpson style "hmmmmm, cheeseburger..." We train ourselves on this food, and it triggers the right parts of our brains to build a bit of an addiction. They talk about this in the movie and I agree with a lot of it.

Things get a little too disgusting in a few places. We see Spurlock (the guy eating all the McDonalds) throw up early on in a pretty graphic way after trying to eat an entire super sized double quarter pounder with cheese meal. Then later on we're treated to more of a gastric bypass surgery then I'd care to see. Aside from those two though the repulsing things in this film aren't visual, they're thinking about the awful treatment this guy is giving his body.

My favorite stat: he gained 17 pounds in his first 12 days. The first time he got weighed the fitness people who had just weighed him six days earlier couldn't believe what they saw and recalibrated the scale to be sure they were getting real results. It was crazy.

If you're interested in removing fast food from your diet, or just want to focus on being healthier, Super Size Me should definitely help to scare you onto the right track. I'm tempted to buy this on DVD when it comes out and just watch it whenever I get a fast food craving. Let's change my associations with fast food from pleasure to repulsion.

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