Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 2 (My Turn to the Dark Side)

It was the spring of 2004, well into my second headfirst foray into the world of fast food (I was eating out regularly throughout my senior year of high school, as well). Depending on my schedule, I would grab McDonalds or donuts for breakfast. My best friend and I would get cheeseburgers from the burger joint nearest to our college for lunch, or I would hit up McDonalds. For dinner, I would eat at one of the aforementioned burger joints or the other, depending on where I went earlier that day.

Then I would eat dinner at work; my lunch break usually consisted of a frozen TV dinner or deli sandwich and potato/macaroni salad. And on the way home, I occasionally stopped by Jack in the Box, McDonalds, Burger King or whoever else happened to be open at 11 p.m.

This was an everyday occurrence. I was averaging fast food two, maybe three times a day. Half-full cereal boxes at home were thrown out. The sandwich meats in my family's refrigerator went to waste. The dinners my parents saved me went down the drain. The only thing I came home for was soda pop (and that was usually to refill the Diet Coke I had already drank on my way home from getting food). At my worst, I was averaging 3-5 Diet Cokes a day. I never drank water.

I began noticing that a set of stairs became difficult. Pulling boxes from the back room at work became tenuous. And in the occasional pickup basketball game, I routinely let my opponents drive by uncontested. It's hard to block shots when you're too busy with your hands on your knees and your face between your legs.

Still, I couldn’t convince myself to drive past a Burger King without buying something. I always said I didn’t have the time to make something, the money to buy something healthy or the know-how to actually get myself onto a balanced diet.

I ate as much fast food as my schedule allowed for. Sometimes for breakfast, I would go to the bagel shop nearby and buy two bagels with cheese and bacon and proceed to call it "healthy" by virtue of being a bagel. And this was on a weekday. On weekends, when my schedules were more flexible, fast food four times a day was pretty much the norm.

On the non-food side of things, I was on my way to becoming the Managing Editor of my school's newspaper, where I met Brian, my co-editor. We didn't know each other very well; all I really knew was that he was on Atkins.

This fast food habit kept up through. By the summer, I was up to nearly 20 times per week. At the time, I lived within a 15-minute drive of more than 20 fast food outlets. Wendy's, Jack in the Box, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burgerville, Dairy Queen, KFC, Arbys and a few others I'm sure I can't remember were close enough so that I didn't feel like I was going out of my way to pick up dinner.

Sometimes, I would have a sausage biscuit with egg, a plain sausage biscuit, a hashbrown and a large Diet Coke for breakfast. Lunch would be a big mac, a plain hamburger, large fries and a large diet coke. Then dinner might be a crispy chicken sandwich, a cheeseburger, large fries and a large diet coke.

That's a lot of McDonalds. Of course, I mixed it up most of the time. I let my heart do the talking, even as my head screamed, "you fucking idiot! Don't you realize what you're doing! You're killing yourself! Have a bowl of cereal! A salad! A ham sandwich! For fuck sake, your heart is crying a river of tears, fatty!"

Then, on June 21, 2004, I saw a double feature: "Dodgeball" and "Super Size Me."

"Dodgeball" was hilarious. But "Super Size Me" changed my life.

To be continued ...