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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Morgan Spurlock searches for a deeper truth -- by turning a mom into a binge drinker and moving a fundamentalist into a gay enclave -- on his new TV show "30 Days."
Jun 15, 2005 | A brilliant gimmick is worth a thousand words, and no one knows that better than Morgan Spurlock. His "really great bad idea" to eat nothing but McDonald's food for a month -- documented in the entertaining and enlightening 2004 film "Super Size Me" -- won him overnight celebrity, the Sundance best director prize and an Academy Award nomination, not to mention a 24.5-pound weight gain, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and impaired liver function.
Spurlock's liver has gotten back to normal since the film came out, but his life hasn't. In May, he released a book, "Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America," pounding home the brutal facts about fast food he'd explored on film. And his new TV show, "30 Days," which premieres on FX this week, applies the experimental gimmick of "Super Size Me" to new landscapes, all with a political edge: How would it feel to be a Muslim for a month? What would it be like to be a binge drinker for that long?
The first episode, which airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. EDT, follows Spurlock and his fiancée, Alex, as they move to Ohio and try to live off minimum-wage jobs for a month. Combining the reality genre with lots of information and some slippery issues in American life, Spurlock has created a fascinating and informative show that broadens viewers' horizons at a time when our policies are as narrow-minded and myopic as ever.
Most of all, Spurlock proves that a good cause and a clever gimmick go together like potatoes and partially hydrogenated soybean oil. But that doesn't stop me from personally blaming him for ending my lifelong love affair with McDonald's fries. So what did I look for when I spoke to him over the phone recently? Signs of weakness, mostly.
What was your life like in the days after you went off the McDiet?
I went through massive withdrawal for the first three days, much like a drug addict or an alcoholic would go through. I felt really, really sick.
How long did it take until you felt good again?
I guess it was maybe a week and a half to two weeks until I started to really feel normal. And I was on Alex's detox for eight weeks before my cholesterol, my liver function and my blood pressure returned to normal. Then it took 14 months for me to lose all the weight.
That's a long time!
Well, I gained 24 and a half pounds. I lost 20 pounds in the first five months. And those last four and a half became the yo-yo pounds, where I'd lose one, gain two, lose three, gain two. I was up and down, up and down for the next nine months. I said to my mother, "I can't understand why it's so hard for me to lose this weight." And my mom's like, "Congratulations, now you know how every woman in the world feels."
Do you feel like your relationship to food has changed?
Oh, completely. The whole thing has made me very aware. It's made me a conscious consumer -- which is what I think we all need to be. We all need to know where our food comes from. What's in it? What is it going to do to me once I eat it? And we don't think about that -- we don't make that connection between our health and our food.
Do you ever have times that you regret being a role model who rejects crappy food, because you can never go to Outback Steakhouse and eat a whole Bloomin' Onion in one sitting?
Bloomin' Onion! Yeah, no, I do not. I don't go for the Bloomin' Onion. I do love onion rings, though. But, come on, I could bread a rock and throw it into some fry oil and be like, "Boy, taste this rock!" Anything that's fried is good. I can't explain why that is.
