Althouse: Aw, look, it's Jeremy Neren of Madtown Munchies, who challenged himself with "28 Days on Munchies" and lost 10 pounds.

March 6, 2009

Aw, look, it's Jeremy Neren of Madtown Munchies, who challenged himself with "28 Days on Munchies" and lost 10 pounds.

He seems to be the anti-Spurlock.

(Madtown Munchies.)

11 comments:

traditionalguy said...: That is so surprising. It's how much of either food type you consume and not the food type difference that results in whether one experiences weight gain or weight loss. What a revelation. What will we discover again next?; 3/6/09, 7:25 AM
Wince said...: Wow, surpise, the weight change of both publicity seekers, Neren and Spurlock, went in the direction of their preferred narrative.; 3/6/09, 7:40 AM
Ann Althouse said...: @EDH Yes, but a difference is that Spurlock was selling a film while trashing somebody else's business, and Neren has a business that doesn't involve trashing anyone. He just wants to deliver food to people in Madison. Plus, he's way cuter than Spurlock.; 3/6/09, 7:54 AM
ricpic said...: I'll bet those munchies cost way more than the unsalted peanuts and raisins I use to diet. Gotta go easy on the raisins but without that sweetness you climb the walls.; 3/6/09, 8:09 AM
BTDGreg said...: It's worth looking up Chuck Klosterman's articles on a related subject. Klosterman, back in his Minnesota days, went a whole month of eating nothing but Chicken McNuggets and says he lost weight (and described it in disgusting detail, even though he thinks McNuggets are delicious). He also wrote a follow-up article in which he has serious doubts about Spurlock's results.

Spurlock lost me about the time I figured out that his whole enterprise was being funded by a entrepreneurial litigator hoping to bring a class action against McDonalds. The one part of the movie I really enjoyed, though, was the interview with the guy who's eaten a Big Mac every day for the last ten years (or whatever it was). His enthusiasm was so genuine that it taught me to love Big Macs again. It was a beautiful thing.; 3/6/09, 8:55 AM
Joe said...: The problem with Spurlock is that he became a glutton--he would stuff himself way beyond what his body demanded, let alone tolerated. The fraud is that if he used the same behavior with the most carefully designed dishes, he would have had the same reaction.

It would have helped if Spurlock was a clever man, but he's not--he's genuinely dumb. His attempt to expose how bad food stamps were instead exposed him as a moron.; 3/6/09, 10:46 AM
Ernesto Ariel Suárez said...: Good for him! This is a pretty good, and honestly old-fashioned marketing idea. He's definitely enterprising, which a lot more than can be said about Spurlock (whom I have never been able to stand); 3/6/09, 10:48 AM
CarmelaMotto said...: Yeah the Spurlock movie lost me as soon as I saw how much he was ordering. You can live on McDonalds and lose weight depending on what you pick on the menu.

Ditto traditional guy. I have this argument with people all the time. One thing I learned from a scientist friend in obesity studies (fat cells) - a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight.; 3/6/09, 1:22 PM
Buford Gooch said...: The "calorie is a calorie" argument used to be one I made. My wife wanted to go on the Atkins diet, so I went on it with her. Just to show her it couldn't possibly work, I bought ten pounds of bacon, cooked it all, and munched it like popcorn while watching TV. To my very great surprise, I lost a substantial amount of weight. I continued on the diet and lost about 45 pounds. All the time I was consuming an enormous amount of calories. I checked my cholesterol before and after, along with triglycerides. Both went down. I have no idea why this worked, but it certainly did, even on someone who was trying to prove it wouldn't. (And it has been loads of fun putting the weight back on after going off the diet.); 3/6/09, 1:46 PM
blake said...: Actually, I liked Supersize Me.

Yes, it was totally rigged, but Spurlock was up front about it: He said I'm going to eat and exercise like an average American (who can't say "no" if someone offers the "superize" deal).

Some of the attendant problems he had were also interesting, i.e., he didn't just get fat.

And he didn't hesitate to interview the Big Mac guy with the perfect cholesterol or the two black kids who were skinny as rails and lived off McD's.

I also think the point about the school cafeterias was legitimate: They could make better food for cheaper than they buy it. (Though this would require skilled labor.)

Spurlock put me off when he got his series and stopped being up front about how he was rigging things to get the desired result.; 3/6/09, 4:39 PM
bearing said...: Why? Why can't we have such a wonderful business operating here in the Twin Cities? Why?

I can see that he's aiming for the college student market, but this mother of three small children would love to have the contents of a convenience store available for delivery in 30 minutes or less. What a brilliant idea.; 3/6/09, 5:07 PM