How To Eat Fast Food Without Getting Fat

There’s nothing unhealthy about having a fast-food meal — even one that’s loaded with fat and calories. The problem arises when you do it too often — like once or twice a day.

The Children’s Hospital of Boston studied 54 teenagers who were asked to eat a 1,600-calorie fast-food meal once a day for a week. All of them did it — but the skinny kids adjusted by eating less during the rest of the day.

In other words, their total daily caloric intake remained the same as it had been before the study, while the fat kids ended up eating, on the average, 400 more calories a day. That’s how my wife keeps her weight down.

If she eats a big meal she complains of feeling “stuffed” the rest of the day and eats very little as a result. But I can “supersize” myself at noon and still be ferociously hungry by 5 p.m. (Which is why I have to work out three hours a day to maintain my weight.)

[Ed. Note.  Mark Morgan Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter. His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]