Eat to Live, Live to Eat or Eat to Die?

I just read an incredibly sad short article about a man who literally ran out of his breath WHILE ordering his food at Wendys (click here for the actual article).

According to the article, he was ordering what seems to be an extraordinary amount of fast food and started to have trouble breathing towards the end of his order.

fitness2xtreme-images-wendys-man

I am not sure if the picture shown in the article is genuine or not (would YOU want to get your picture taken and the restaurant seats in the background is completely empty), but if we were to assume that it is true, this is what I came up with using Wendy’s nutrition chart

Total Caloric Intake Summary

ID Item Size Calories Fat(g) Sodium(mg) Tot Carb(g) Sugars(g) Protein(g)
A Barq’s Root Beer (1) Large 540 0 120 150 150 0
B Natural-cut Fries Large 530 25 570 68 7 6
C Chicken Nuggets (2) 5 pc 220 14 460 13 1 10
D Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger Value 400 24 930 25 5 21
E Ketchup Packet 10 0 95 3 2 0
F Baked Potato Plain 270 0 25 61 3 7
G Frosty-strawberry Large 810 16 230 153 140 130
H Chilli Large 310 9 1330 31 10 26
Total 3090 88 3760 504 318 200


(1) Wendy’s nutrition guide does NOT contain caloric info for LARGE drinks so the numbers were calculated based on their SMALL sized beverage;
(2) The article did not contain any references to chicken nuggets but the picture told otherwise;

What he just consumed for his lunch is above and beyond the USDA’s daily recommended caloric intake and his sodium intake is incredibly high at 3,760 mg. Just keep in mind that there is 2,400 mg per teaspoon, so envision chewing about 1.5 teaspoonful of salt!

To put in better perspective, let’s use a simplified caloric burn rate table (link)

fitness2xtreme-images-caloric-burn-rate-table

Looking at Brett’s picture, I would guess he weighs around 190 lbs (hard to guess because he is sitting down). Based on the amount of calories he consumed just for his LUNCH, he would need to do the following to burn them off:

Running

  • According to the table, you burn off 142 calories for running a mile under 8 minutes
  • That means to burn off 3,090 calories, he needs to run 21.76 miles at that pace!

Walking

  • Since I highly doubt he can run at the 8 min/mile pace, let’s try walking instead
  • Walking a mile under 20 minutes require 130 calories.
  • That means, it would take 23.77 miles or almost 8 hours of walking to burn off those calories!

All these physical activities do not factor in other negative health effects of consuming such large amounts of salt, saturated fats, etc. which would probably result in high medical expenses in the future.

Listen, I am the first to admit that I am out of shape and I sometimes eat at Wendy’s.  But looking at him and his food, I could not help but feel sad.

I hope he would do whatever is necessary to take that first step in the right direction of getting healthy.  If you are totally lost about how to get started, I can recommend an awesome reading (here – NOT an affiliate link)

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