What To Order At McDonald's For Fat Loss (Men Over 40) - 150

Coach Brian Parana (0:2.604) You've ordered a Big Mac meal more times than you can count. You've never once checked what's in it. Yeah, the special sauce, two patties, the cheese, the lettuce, all those things. Of course, you know those things, but you actually didn't look under the hood, so to speak. That's not the order I want to talk about first, though. The real damage on this menu isn't coming from the burger. It's actually coming from the breakfast. Coach Brian Parana (0:32.514) The Big Breakfast with Hotcakes looks like a responsible order. It has eggs, some hotcakes, a full plate, the first meal of the day to start things out — at 1340 calories, 64 grams of fat, which is your daily allotted amount, and 2,090 milligrams of sodium, again, your daily amount. Good job starting off strong, and you have less than 40% of your calories, 30% of your calories left Coach Brian Parana (1:1.422) for the day. You've been trained to watch out for the burger. The burger isn't the worst thing on the menu. By the end of this, you'll know exactly what to order at McDonald's without thinking twice. Yes, it is McDonald's today. The same way you've already ordered every single time that you go in — we need to change that script. Welcome back to Driven for Health. This is Coach Brian Parana (1:26.924) Coach Brian talking at episode 150. What better to bring it in with McDonald's? I hope that you're enjoying the What To Order series. There's still plenty more. This will be our fifth episode. We've had Chipotle, Starbucks, Panera, Subway, Chick-fil-A, and now McDonald's. We'll keep expanding on it and getting into some more fine dining restaurant experience as well. Coach Brian Parana (1:54.892) maybe a buffet, all this stuff. And remember, let's not wait to the end, but the Eating On The Go guide is something you can grab in the show notes and download it for free. And it helps you understand where you're eating, what to pick at all sorts of different restaurants — from fast casual, fine dining, on the road, in the airport, at a gas station, and beyond. Coach Brian Parana (2:20.459) Buffet style, all these things are easy to understand. There's a table of contents, and you can just flip through what you want. So download that, check the link in the notes, and off we go to explore McDonald's. It's the most ordered restaurant in this whole series. Hence why I saved it for episode 150. Just a good one to do. Alright. McDonald's has been a major part of Coach Brian Parana (2:47.923) my life — not that I eat there, but I have known about McDonald's. I certainly have eaten there. I don't eat there on a lot of occasions. And I certainly have my go-tos, like an Egg McMuffin would be the go-to thing. And we'll talk about a couple different ideas on how you can actually make it reasonable here to lose weight or fat or stay on track, even if you're driving around from one place to another, or this is the only thing Coach Brian Parana (3:16.967) still open at the time that you do go there. Ronald's been smiling on this menu for over sixty years. He's never once told you what's in that special sauce. The menu hasn't changed as much as you think. Sure, they have different specials and the McRib comes and goes and the Shamrock Shake and they have their seasonal highlights, but in general they're serving burgers, fries, there's some salads, chicken entrees, your Coach Brian Parana (3:46.432) ice cream type and Coke products. Alright. Those are the main things that they end up serving. I'm sure there's other things, but those are pretty — and the glorious French fries, right? That's giving the golden arches their image. And you might have the same default order that you've had for 20 years and it's not working for you anymore. Especially if you are overweight or have chronic illness. McDonald's is not the place to go to or to be at, Coach Brian Parana (4:16.265) right? And if we have a Happy Meal, like you're running the kids around and trying to get them some food and you give a Happy Meal — is that a good idea or not? Maybe we can talk about it too. Let's go through the tiers. This has been a good part of the series. I've had a lot of comments on it. A lot of people have been emailing me or commenting on the show, and I really appreciate that. The more comment engagement, the more exciting Coach Brian Parana (4:45.119) it is to keep delivering these things, especially at the pace. This is 150 since September. That's almost one every two to three days. So I hope that you guys are getting a lot of value out of this. Let's go through the tiers. Eight real orders, worst to best. One thing before we start — McDonald's pulled salads off the US menu back in 2020. Never brought them back. So there's no salad on the list. Alright. Coach Brian Parana (5:13.183) Number one is the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes. Two out of ten. That's the same style of what we introed this podcast with. Tons of calories, sodium, fat. Oof, it is going to blow the lid off. And this is one of the worst orders on the entire McDonald's menu. It looks like a good choice, but it really is calorie dense. Number two, the McFlurry. You always see that one in the Coach Brian Parana (5:42.132) Oreo McFlurry advertised. Three out of ten. It's about six hundred calories. This is a medium on average. Twenty-two grams of fat, thirteen grams of protein because of the dairy in the whole thing. What does that mean? 13 times four — four being the calorie calculator for protein. That is what, 50-ish, Coach Brian Parana (6:9.335) 55 calories out of the whole 600, excuse me, 600 calories there. Holy cow. And then if we do the calorie multiplier, fat is nine calories per gram. Twenty-two times nine. I like to just go ten minus nine. So that'll be two twenty minus nine is two eleven. Two hundred and eleven is a third of it coming from fat. So the rest is carbs, obviously, and sugar there as well. Coach Brian Parana (6:39.013) And on its own, this whole thing closes out a third of your day's calories for most guys trying to lose weight. And this is just this small, like medium or snack size. The snack size is around 420 calories, still gonna make you work in a sense of how to manage your food. Holy cow, that's a lot of calories. Coach Brian Parana (7:8.321) This cup costs about the same as a Big Mac at 600, as the actual McFlurry. So if you got a Big Mac and you're like, hey, I really get to treat myself, I'm gonna have a McFlurry too — that's 1200 calories or so. And a lot of sodium and a lot, a lot of fat there. Number three. Coach Brian Parana (7:33.550) How about we just get the McFlurry and the fries and dip them together, right? That's more of a Wendy's episode here, right? You get the Frosty and the fries thing going on, but we'll save that one for later. A large fry is over 500 calories, if you didn't recognize that. 24 grams of fat, 400 milligrams of sodium, and it's like 20, 30 calories worth of protein. It's Coach Brian Parana (8:3.287) fat and carbs. This is a side dish that almost has as many calories as the sandwich it's sitting next to — Big Mac, large fry. And back in the day, the supersize menu, whoo man. What is that? That could be more than twelve hundred, more like fifteen hundred calories easy from just that combo. And that's just lunch and you're not really full from it. And man, your carbs and sugars are Coach Brian Parana (8:33.409) bumping. Number four, the McChicken. Five out of ten. We're slowly getting better here. 400 calories, 14 grams of protein with 20 grams of fat. So there's more fat again. This is a challenge for you to get more of what you want. Now, with this one, it's the breading that's there. You've got also the bread as well. Gonna be a lot of carbs in this and taking up a lot of the calories. And it's fried, and therefore Coach Brian Parana (9:2.955) it has a lot of fat calories in it. It's cheap, but it's low protein. You automatically think that you're getting protein because it's chicken, but it's not a lot of chicken, especially when the breading takes up — say again, off the top of my head — say a quarter of the overall amount of food that's there. The actual chicken patty is gonna be breading. It takes up a lot of space. Coach Brian Parana (9:32.844) So it looks bigger, but it's actually just a lot more carbs and fats. Alright. How did this one get so high up on the list, huh? But it's about 600 calories, 26 grams of protein for those double patties, and 33 grams of fat and a thousand milligrams of sodium. So this one's gonna be not a homestead whopper, Coach Brian Parana (10:0.722) right? That's the Burger King special that we will end up doing one on. And it'll probably sound similar to McDonald's, right? Because they serve the same thing. Same thing with Wendy's, just different style of burgers, but they're all fatty patties — that rhymes, fatty patties — because there's not a high quality amount of meat there. The most famous of the orders is Coach Brian Parana (10:26.667) by far the Big Mac, and I wish I knew the jingle. Again, I've been around McDonald's for a long time, but I know there's a jingle around the Big Mac. I would sing it to you, but you would probably end listening to me right then and there. Number six is the 10-piece Chicken McNugget. Again, the appearance is this is a protein source. Let's break it down. 420 calories in a 10-piece. Coach Brian Parana (10:53.687) Let's do some quick math. That means 42 calories per chicken nugget. To make it even easier math, just call it one chicken nugget, 50 calories, and ta-da. Simple, easy math. So you can quickly add and/or multiply how many calories are in that Chicken McNugget. 21 grams of protein in the 10 pieces. So let's do simple math. It's like two grams of protein per chicken nugget at 50 calories. That is Coach Brian Parana (11:23.351) two times four is only eight calories of protein. There's eight calories of protein out of the 50. So not protein dense. And they're packing 800 milligrams of sodium, just under about 40%, 50% in that range of your total daily sodium intake. Better protein than the McChicken for fewer calories, but it's still fried and still has the breading on it, and the fat is bumping here too. Coach Brian Parana (11:52.776) And this is as soon as we start adding those dipping packs in there — and well, bam, each nugget dipped twice or three times because you're using your own container and it doesn't matter if you do double dips, you're fine. Right? That we end up packing on more calories. Remember the Chick-fil-A sauce was over a hundred calories just for it — it was about 150. Coach Brian Parana (12:19.499) So these packets can have a lot of carbs and sugars in them. Number seven, the McCrispy. This is 470 calories, 27 grams of protein and 20 grams of fat. So this is one of the best protein and fat ratios so far. This one actually has more protein than fat. The first one, finally, which makes it better. Alright. Coach Brian Parana (12:46.091) The real hack, if you want to order with no bun and split them, or even just split the bun and eat an open face sandwich, then you get the same amount of protein, you end up cutting down on the carbs. Think of a bun. A typical bun that you buy in a store is about 120. Now, the buns at McDonald's could have a little enhancement. I actually worked at Burger King as one of my first jobs back in high school. My buddy Dan, I talked about him a little bit Coach Brian Parana (13:16.125) on here — he works out with me and he's got four kids and we're busy and we still make time to see each other, which is really cool, all the way back from high school. But for me, I worked at Burger King and I would see how these things were processed. I don't have the inside track of what happens behind the counter, but as soon as you slather anything on a bun, it jumps up to probably closer to 200 calories. So something to pay attention to. Coach Brian Parana (13:43.970) Now, if you do that type of a hack — some of the bun or half the bun — that ends up being one of the best sandwiches that you can go with. Number eight, the Egg McMuffin. This one's winning: 310 calories, 17 grams of protein, 13 grams of fat. It's one of the best calories to protein ratios on the entire menu. And we can order it with double the protein, in a sense, get more Canadian bacon, which is Coach Brian Parana (14:12.671) a very low fat, higher protein, and even adding an egg, if you wanted to bump it up a little bit. Certainly it'll get more around 400 calories, but it will have more protein on it, which will make it better. If the breakfast hour is over, the McDouble, excuse me, is becoming the next best value play at 22 grams of protein for roughly around four dollars. Depends on if it's on the Coach Brian Parana (14:40.395) two or three or four dollar menu or whatever they have there. The Egg McMuffin is the king though. That would be the go-to order to hold you over for a little bit there as we go. Say before 10:30, because McDonald's says that that's when breakfast is over in America — then let's get the Egg McMuffin. Alright. Explain why and you'll do yourself a favor, that you'll still have energy Coach Brian Parana (15:9.257) later in the day and not be in a carb coma from the Big Breakfast that we talked about in the beginning. After 10:30, the McCrispy wins with no bun or even half the bun. That ends up being a power play here. So you have 27 grams of protein there and you can eliminate a lot of the carbs from that. But if money matters, then we can get a McDouble. Ultimately, you know my take — you probably shouldn't be eating at McDonald's if you're trying to help with your health Coach Brian Parana (15:38.782) and weight loss and all. It just ends up making a lot of work. But a power move, just in case you're running on empty, so to speak, or on fumes, and you need something: a McCrispy, no bun, and get the apple slices. That can help give you under 500 calories, 27 grams of protein, and real fruit — or I think at least I think it's real fruit that is inside those slices there in that package — that can help you Coach Brian Parana (16:8.331) definitely eliminate the excessive amount of carbs and fats that you will get from the fries themselves. Alright, so the salads, unfortunately, are no more. They dropped them back in 2020. So we keep the apple slices moving. So get the Egg McMuffin and a black coffee, no hash brown, please, because that can add quite a bit of calories too. Coach Brian Parana (16:33.697) Now the company. McDonald's has marketed fresh, never frozen beef on the Quarter Pounder since twenty eighteen. It's still the claim on their own website today. Cooked to order, not sitting frozen in a warehouse. This is a challenge because we have things that happen around beef and E. coli, and there's an outbreak tied to Quarter Pounders back in twenty twenty-four. Coach Brian Parana (17:1.451) Now there's only 104 people that got sick across 14 states, and 34 were hospitalized. But that's a small relative portion, of course. But just like Taco Bell, which again will probably be on another episode — we don't want to be currently going around with the lettuce that is a bathroom blowout. So you gotta be careful about that. The beef, McDonald's says, wasn't the problem. Every patty tested negative. Coach Brian Parana (17:30.561) The source was fresh sliced onions from a separate supplier, and no one would think that onions would cause such a problem. It was over by a few weeks in and back to, in quotation, fresh and safe. But we have to think fresh and safe aren't necessarily the same words there as well. Here's a number that tells you how many Coach Brian Parana (17:56.664) people still want this food anyways. McDonald's is rebuilding more than 27,000 drive-thru locations worldwide right now. Adding double lanes. So taking a note from good old Chick-fil-A, and separate lanes for mobile orders. So we see that even in the one closest to me, there's two pull-off lanes in the drive-thru that you can go from either one. And then they'll probably have a lot of people outside as well to help manage Coach Brian Parana (18:24.631) drive-thru traffic, and that's definitely up. Drive-thru alone is about 70% of their entire US sales, which is staggering. And the average drive-thru visit has gotten slower, not faster. Even with new technology, it really hasn't fixed it. And in my world, if everyone that I work with is busy and has a time demanding schedule, you do not want to get stuck at McDonald's waiting while your Coach Brian Parana (18:54.549) meeting is slowly coming up. That is a disaster for being late, and not for a great reason. And in general, guys, if you just pack a protein-packed sandwich with low calorie bread — like six ounces of protein, turkey, chicken, even roast beef, lean cuts of roast beef can work — with low-calorie bread, 70 calories a slice, a piece of fruit, and say two handfuls of vegetables, that's a forever lunch. Coach Brian Parana (19:24.193) That's the best advice that I can give you. And I give all my guys: hey, pack your lunch, eat what you pack. You save time, you save money, you save convenience. Actually, it's way more convenient just to pack and eat. And you can ideally use the rest of the time to walk and move your body, not to just work more. So when we go at McDonald's, we just have to look at the menu and the order that you've picked for 20 years Coach Brian Parana (19:52.300) and never looked at or paid attention to with the calories or the macros. Maybe you should, because it's there available to you, and we need to just refamiliarize yourself. So even if this is a once-a-month stop for you, none of this changes. We still need to be calorie conscious, we still need to make sure that we're paying attention to how much protein we're getting, keeping fat levels low, and making sure that we're not overdoing any Coach Brian Parana (20:20.343) food option prepared by someone else. Well, from here we're moving on to the Fast Five to wrap up this episode. And number one, why doesn't McDonald's sell salads anymore? Well, they pulled it back in 2020 to cut down on supply and staffing problems during the pandemic. Franchise owners got the option to bring it back in 2022. Most said no. And McDonald's own president put it pretty frankly here. Coach Brian Parana (20:46.325) It's not that customers aren't asking for it. The salads are still on the menu outside of the US. Even the hamburger never went after a salad though. That wasn't one to steal, in a sense, the hamburger burgers, right? So there you go. They could bring it, but think about salads and the extra emphasis on keeping food preparation safe and Coach Brian Parana (21:11.539) having space in the freezer and having to be able to sell it without having to throw it away. If you're an owner, it's a liability. Number two, what's the leanest burger on the menu? The plain hamburger, no cheese. About 250 calories. A cheeseburger is about 300 because of the cheese. Those end up being the easiest thing to grab on the menu at the cheapest cost, or relatively pretty cheap in comparison to everything else. But with that it ends up still being not very filling. Coach Brian Parana (21:42.102) Number three, is the Quarter Pounder good for protein? The Double Quarter Pounder has the most protein on the whole menu at over 48 grams. So there it falls into that 40 to 50 grams of protein, but the trade-off is 1300 milligrams of sodium, which is roughly say 60%, and it has 42 grams of fat. Almost all of your fat grams — for say 70 to even maybe 80% if you're trying to lose weight. Coach Brian Parana (22:11.553) That is not a go anymore. Number four, is there a real low carb move here? Yes, the McCrispy, no bun. Bam. And then we can even do the Egg McMuffin. We can take off one of the English muffin halves. We can order more egg, or a double McCrispy in a sense without the bun, or add an extra slice of Canadian bacon there. Coach Brian Parana (22:40.107) So it'll boost the protein there. Number five, how many McDonald's are there? There's over 13,000 in the US alone, and they're still building more. Over 27,000 drive-thrus are getting rebuilt worldwide to handle the volume that is already coming through the doors. So that's the Fast Five for this episode. And in closing, Coach Brian Parana (23:5.617) if you're a busy on-the-go guy that's got a lot going on and is time challenged, then I get having McDonald's as being an easy option for you. But is it really convenient? I don't know. I don't think so. We go back to the power move of packing your own meal and having the chicken — like your own chicken sandwich, in a sense — with some fruit and some vegetables. That can be a power move. It's boring, but Coach Brian Parana (23:35.287) boring is what gets the job done. And it doesn't have to taste bad. We can definitely get it to taste good and help you enjoy that experience. There's lots of ways to make food taste good. I would really enjoy that meal. So make sure that you are paying attention, no matter if you're just in a normal day-to-day, you're on the road, you're traveling, you're after a kid's practice, or any of those. I mean, you drive through them, Coach Brian Parana (24:4.201) next to them, all the time. You know, even a 50 mile road trip could turn into passing 10 McDonald's along the way, depending on how much suburbia that you live around or cities that you go to. Now if you need some help, we got two things here. One is the Eating On The Go guide I referenced earlier. go.brianparana.com/eatingonthego. Download it. It's free. Coach Brian Parana (24:30.153) It's like twenty-eight pages long. It's packed full of all sorts of good stuff for you to be able to get a lot out of. Very important. There's Chick-fil-A, Subway, Chipotle, all sorts of fine dining, on the go, gas stations, airports, and beyond. From there, if you need to actually take action and you want a life change, that's what the Call To Rise program is. It's my flagship offer of helping men in their 40s and 50s Coach Brian Parana (24:58.081) get their health back, lead a life of legacy. Lose 20 plus pounds in 100 days, improve your blood panels. We take blood samples and then look for improvement over the course of the 100 days — the first day and the hundredth day. And then we see magic happen because we align it with your lifestyle. Educate, but also implement into your everyday life. Super important in this process so that you are successful. Coach Brian Parana (25:26.197) Alright, gotta be successful here or else it's not going to work. The website has all the details. I went through great length to explain it all. And then if someone's on the go and eats out a lot, send them the series. I'd so appreciate that. And you know, drop me a line of what you'd like to hear in the series as well. That's it for Driven for Health. Train hard, eat smart, and I'll catch you in the next one. Coach Brian Parana (25:55.155) Again, another suspense hanger here, not gonna tell you what it is. Later.