Hello all,
For the better part of yesterday and today, i decided to watch a few documentaries on health and fitness and these are my reviews.
First Film
Fat Head
This documentary is based off of the 2004 film Super Size Me.
Tom Naughton goes around and tries to debunk the theory that Super Size Me claims that McDonald’s all across the world are to blame for the obesity problem.
With a Doctors’ guidance, Tom eats 3 meals a day from McDonald’s for 30 days. The catch is, the meals all together are just under the 2,000 calorie mark. In doing so, Tom’s shows a clip from Super Size Me which Morgan Spurlock claims he eats 5,000 calories a day in McDonald’s food. However there are no food journals that would support his claim.
Another claim that Spurlock made was that after eating McDonald’s food for several days, it physically made him sick, and at this point in the film Tom does a parody of him and in fact doesn’t feel any sickness towards eating all meals from McDonalds
A point that Tom wanted to get across which was pretty evident, was that in Super Size Me, Morgan kept saying how the fast food industry is the one to blame for forcing customers to eat their food and sometimes “ super size their order “ or “ add fries and a drink “. Tom makes a strong point that in fact it isn’t the industry who force’s people to eat their food, rather the individual who choice’s to eat poorly.
The film goes on to show that at the end of the 30 days, Tom not only lost weight but lowered his cholesterol.
I Want Look Like That Guy
This is a story about an average guy named Stuart MacDonald, who was chubby and sitting at 30% body fat. After years of trying to “Look like that guy” in the magazines, Stuart decided to befriend the gym owner of his gym he works out at. We find out soon after that the gym owner is an ex body builder and fitness model.
Stuart approaches him to work with him for 6 months to train and get him ready for an armature body building contest 6 months down the road.
With the help of his Doctor and a few fitness consultants at the University of Michigan, Stuart gets his Body Mass Index (BMI) done. This shows he is around 27% body fat, and in the BMI range that is considered obese.
Stuart then enlists the owner of the gym Jeff Willet to help coach and train Stuart to be stage ready.
During the process, this film shows Stuart with his every day struggles such as, getting injured, getting a cold and even falling off the diet wagon.
Jeff, who knows what it takes, calms Stuart down and explains each stage.
Stage 1 – Lifting as heavy weight as possible for a max of 4-6 reps, once his body can do 6, he increases the weight. His eating will stay normal but he is watching what he is eating.
Stage 2 – More reps and 16-20 minutes of cardio 2 times per day and restricting his caloric intake. As the time got closer to competition, every month, Jeff would tell Stuart to cut eve more calories to his diet.
At one point Stuart was eating only 1,390 calories. At this point in the film you can see what his life has become. He is struggling to stay awake at work, his family isn’t supportive of this and not only is it taking a physical toll on him, it is effecting his personal life.
On competition day, Stuart is 3 pounds over his class weight and with only 2 hours to the show, he is shown outside running around the parking to lot burn those extra few pounds off.
Stuart ended up coming 2nd place for his weight class and 2nd overall at this event.
I think this was a very well done film to prove that being a “fitness model” isn’t all that is cracked up to be. For most, they prep all year long for that 1 or 2 photo shoots and then they go off of it. After the end of the film once Stuart starting eating normally again, he lost is visible 6 pack abs and gained 10 pounds back in a week
great movie all and all
Again take any information about my reviews on the films with a grain of salt, since we don’t really know what kind of editing really happened.
Over the past 15 years, health and fitness have been a huge part of my life. As a kid, I grew up playing hockey during the winters and soccer during the summer to keep me in shape all year long. It wasn’t until the fall of 2005 that I fell in love with running, prompting me to run in four marathons, which led me to my new found passion in exercising.