Heart Attack Grill

Sunday, October 11, 2009

http://www.heartattackgrill.com/media.html

Maybe some of you have come across this place before now, but my first exposure to the Heart Attack Grill (see link above), was tonight at work when I walked by the television playing the Travel Channel as I was going to the restroom. At first I couldn't figure out what they were talking about but I hung around until I did. Burgers were smothered in cheese and mayonnaise. Instead of a salad bar, they have a french fry bar on which the fries are cooked in lard. People over 350 pounds eat free--every day. I was fairly taken aback, honestly, but then I applauded the owner for his originality. His was a marketing strategy to do what he can to make a buck. I get it, and "it" is brilliant. As they interviewed the patrons, however, I was disheartened. As one would expect, they were all corpulent, but they were also deluded and complacent, often stating in their brief interviews that they were glad they were already on cholesterol medicine.

I wonder, though, if these restaurant patrons even remotely begin to understand that even one meal like this has an immediate effect on their system. We tend to think of things like our nutritional intake in the cumulative, and ultimately, that is the most important thing. I, like most active and health-oriented people, believe in the mental health behind an occasional "cheat day" or "cheat meal." Complete glutinous debauchery like this, however, can have immediate ramifications. Within minutes of completing a high fat meal like this, our body is bombarded with its contents and is forced to deal with them. For some, the result is fat-laden blood like this (you might remember this pic from last year on my blog):

The blood on the right is what blood is supposed to look like after it's gone through the centrifuge. The blood on the left is the blood of a woman who had, in the last few hours, had a high fat meal. That stuff that looks like a cream layer on the top?...it's, well, a cream layer, a layer of fat on her blood, fat that was dispersed in the blood before the centrifuge.

How well do you think that blood functions? How smoothly do you think it flows through the tiny vessels of your heart, brain, kidneys, feet, and eyes? It functions so poorly in so many ways, in fact, that research is showing that the hours following a meal like one at the Heart Attack Grill actually show an increase in heart attacks (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0813/is_n4_v21/ai_15224643/).

Please don't misunderstand me. I appreciate capitalism and originality. I think the fellow who came up with this concept is absolutely brilliant, and I wouldn't picket or protest his business. Heck, I might even visit it on a cheat day. :) I wish, though, that ours was a world where a concept like this would wither and die for lack of business while the parking lot in front became the town's rowdiest tire-flipping, kettlebell swinging, rope flinging gathering place of people.

TODAY'S WORKOUT WAS A SHORT ONE: 6 minutes of 16kg snatches, 30 burpees.

YESTERDAY'S WORKOUT: See the press/squat/push up/dead/plank/burpee workout above...BUT I got 3 (count them...THREE rounds of 2/2 strict presses with the 20kg!). I had to add some burpees to total correctly for the burpee challenge, too.