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Eat Taco Bell and you can look like Christine too!

If there’s one thing I’ve lurnd after kicking around on this planet for the last 21.3 years, it’s that quality food does not come from a drive-through bargain menu. A typical fast-food experience usually consists of a screwed up order, an interesting interaction with a high school drop-out, and a basket of food which tastes like salty cardboard (not that I’ve actually eaten salty cardboard).

That being so, there are many times when I’m hungry and can’t afford quality food. During said times, I often find myself reluctantly headed towards taco bell to order several of the 6 vegetarian-esque options from their value menu. I usually have no complaints. I end up with a three piece, 890 calorie meal for 2 bucks and some change, a pretty good dollar to calorie ratio. In addition, it usually tastes okay, does not make me sick (usually), and is overall a much better experience than I could obtain at any of their competitor’s dining establishments.

This was all fine and good until recently, when taco bell decided to jump on Subway’s Jared bandwagon and tout their fresco-style food items under a new marketing campaign deemed “the drive through diet.” This seemed too… fake… to be true, so I hopped on the good old inter-web to get the scoop.

They don't look as good in real life.

Here’s the story: Subway had Jared. He was kind of nerdy, wore glasses, ate lots of sandwiches, and always walked around holding up an enormous pair of pants which he used to wear. Taco Bell stole that idea, fed it some steroids, and brought us Christine.

According to the campaign, Christine started choosing Fresco items from the Drive Through Diet menu and ‘making other sensible choices.’ She cut her daily calorie consumption down to a measly 1,250 (62.5 % of the recommended daily value) for the short period of 2 years, and was able to drop 54 whole pounds, reaching her current weight where she looks quite pleasant (IMO) in a swimsuit. Amazing, right?

What Christine shows us is that if we eat 63% of what we are supposed to eat, we can lose half a pound each week, even if we sometimes go to taco bell!

Taco Bell’s claim here is really quite weak. Where Jared supposedly ate Subway twice a day, we have no idea how often Christine ate Taco Bell. All we know is that she chose Fresco items while also making other sensible choices. For all we know Christine could have eaten Taco Bell once a year while dieting and exercising normally.

Simply diet for two years and you will lose weight too!

Furthermore, this campaign is overflowing with disclaimers. At the bottom of the page detailing Christine’s story, we notice a disclaimer beginning with “Drive-Thru-Diet is not a weight-loss program.” A bit further down we see the warning “Not a low calorie food.”

Apparently, the diet items can reduce calories by 20 – 100 calories per item. Interestingly enough, this is the same amount of calories you will save by asking for no cheese and no sour-cream. Indeed, Taco Bell did not engineer some crazy new diet food for us to stuff our mouths with. Instead, they are charging us the same price for our food, keeping our cheese and sour-cream, throwing in some extra tomatoes, and telling us it will turn us into swim-suit models. Actually, asking for a regular item without cheese is sometimes healthier than the fresco option, according to their on-line calorie calculator. Oh, how I love marketing.

When all is said and done, Taco Bell tastes pretty good. Their prices are even better. But, can we please not confuse this stuff with health food? Taco Bell is good for one thing: feeding cheap ass food to poor people like myself. They need to drop this diet gig and stick to what they’re good at.

Check out a few of the diets below which I threw together. Perhaps Christine should have tried the pure pizza diet, or maybe the cold-stone ice-cream only diet.

Hefty Diet: (7.2lbs of food per day!)

This diet is what I imagine a big guy would eat in a day if he ate 3-4 meals per day at Taco Bell, and was forced to stick to the Fresco Menu
3 Fresco Bean Burritos
6 Fresco Steak Burrito Supreme
9 Fresco Grilled Chicken Soft Tacos

Average Diet: (3.3lbs of food per day)

This diet is the amount you would have to eat each day if you wanted to stick to the fresco menu, and consume the recommended daily average of 2,000 calories
1 Fresco Bean Burrito
3 Fresco Steak Burrito Supreme
4 Fresco Grilled Chicken Soft Tacos

Pizza Hut Diet:(1.5lbs of food per day)

This diet is what you could eat each day if you wanted to consume as many calories as Christine while only eating pizza hut pizza
7 slices of Vegie Lovers Thin Crust Pizza

Cold Stone Diet:(1.1lbs of food per day)

This diet is what you would have to eat each day if you wanted to consume the same amount of calories as Christine, while eating nothing other than Cold Stone Cake Batter Ice Cream
18oz of Coldstone Cake-Batter Ice Cream

Christine Diet: (1.7lbs of food per day)

This diet is what Christine would have eaten each day if she ate only taco-bell fresco items and kept her daily calories at 1250, her official daily calorie intake.
2 Fresco Bean Burritos
1 Fresco Chicken Burrito Supreme
1 Fresco Soft Taco
6 pieces of chewing gum (for the extra 30 calories and to help with hunger pangs)

Totals:

Here we have the Nutrition facts for each of the diets described above…

The point here is that if you cut your calorie intake down to 60-some percent of what it ought to be, you’re going to lose weight. No matter if you eat purely ice-cream or purely pizza, a 1250 calorie diet is going to result in weight-loss. Clearly, this doesn’t make for a healthy diet. Instead of making you healthy, a taco-bell diet would lead to a severely malnourished individual, and as we saw above, is about as good for you as eating nothing but pizza.

There’s nothing wrong with including taco-bell in your starving student food repertoire, just don’t pretend you’re eating healthy.