Remember the Super Size Me documentary with Morgan Spurlock that showed the side effects of eating nothing but McDonald’s for one month? Spurlock gained 24.5 pounds in 30 days, proving that eating McDonald’s for every meal probably isn’t the best idea. As an answer to that documentary, a science teacher from Iowa ate nothing but McDonald’s menu items for 90 days and actually lost weight.

Science teacher John Cisna decided to teach his students that it doesn’t matter so much where we eat, but what we eat. Cisna put together his own documentary that detailed the food choices he made for breakfast, lunch and dinner at a local McDonald’s for three months “The point behind this documentary is we all have choices,” Cisna said. “It’s not McDonald’s that makes us fat, it’s our choices.”

Before Cisna started the project, his cholesterol was at 249, which dropped down to 170 by the end of the 90 days. Not only did the science teacher cut his cholesterol, he also saw a decrease in his waist size–Cisna lost 37 pounds during his 90 days of eating at McDonald’s.

Check out Cisna’s before and after pictures below.

This guy bucks the trend http://t.co/yeDQMLCCvx (an eating trend we hope doesn’t continue in 2014) pic.twitter.com/aNlm97ZE4k

— KMBC (@kmbc) January 3, 2014

To prove that you can eat healthy at places like McDonald’s, Cisna restricted himself to 2,000 calories per day and let his students pick out his menu by using McDonald’s online nutritional information. Lest you think Cisna only ate selections from McDonald’s salad menu, that wasn’t the case here. “So this isn’t something where you say, ‘Well he went to McDonald’s and he only had the salads,’” Cisna said. “No, I had the Big Macs, the Quarter Pounders with cheese, I had sundaes, I had ice cream cones.”

Cisna didn’t eat Big Macs and hot fudge sundaes at every meal, either. If his dinner plans included eating a burger, he made sure to eat a reasonable breakfast and lunch. “A typical breakfast would be two egg white delights, a bowl of their maple oatmeal and a 1 percent milk. I can eat any food at McDonald’s I want as long as I’m smart for the rest of the day with what I balance it out with,” Cisna said. Cisna also started walking for 45 minutes every day, something that certainly factored into his weight loss and lowered cholesterol.

While it’s easy to say that the science teacher’s diet was nothing more than applying common sense, it may certainly make people think twice about saying that eating at fast food restaurants is bad for you. Now that Cisna’s success has made headlines, will McDonald’s steal a move from Subway and use Cisna to promote a McDonald’s diet?

Image via YouTube