It’s a new week, and I have big news.

Saturday, after day drinking copious amounts of beer, I was driven by my sober fiancée and stumbled into a furniture store, where I bought a shag rug. This is for the office in my new house which I don’t yet technically own. Just look at this beauty.

As I don’t currently have the office that this majestic piece will live in, I’m breaking it in as I write this article.

I’ve wanted a shag rug since I was a kid and as I’ll finally have my own real house to put it in, I made it a top priority. This is the first piece of furniture I’ve bought for my entire house, so I think it’s clear I have my priorities in order.

Why is the fact that I got drunk and shag-carpeted my bed relevant? Well, it’s not at all, but my feet and behind are pretty warm with this thing under me and I need to somehow work it into this article.

Secondly, this is POST #100 on Nostalgia Trigger! It’s been a good run so far and the lights are still on. As a means of celebrating, you may remember about a week ago I was nominated by Robert of Adventure Rules to partake in a challenge called #MyFirstPostRevisited, where you post, unchanged, your first blog post. Not the first popular one, but your first post. If you haven’t already read the post on Adventure Rules, please check it out! Sharing content with everyone that is sub-par in your own eyes can be tough, I know it definitely was for me.

As post #100 I can’t think of a better thing to do than to look back and think “what the hell was I thinking?” so this nomination timing was simply perfect.

Before I jump into a very brief history of this blog, I’d like to nominate someone as well and pay it forward. Firstly, I’d like to tag Imtiaz of Power Bomb Attack for being a mad cool dude who’s been very welcoming in this community. Second, I’d like to tag Kresnik from kresnik258gaming, whose articles primarily focused on the Vita are entertaining and well-researched, and everyone should check out. No pressure guys!

History of my Blog

As did my nominator, I will follow suit and write out a brief history of my blog. Like Robert, I, too, had a different blog before this, but on the same WordPress account. It didn’t have any real purpose or reason to exist, it was a place for me to post nonsense and stray thoughts when Facebook wasn’t a good venue. I used to post dumb pictures of myself and maybe 2 people would see it.

What was the blog called? Geddy’s Glorious Face. I think I was inspired by this site. I was, and still am, a huge Parks & Recreation fan. But the name didn’t mean a whole lot and I just kind of threw things on there that had no business being anywhere else. It was a personal blog, and personal blogs are hard. “Why would anyone care about some random on the Internet?” was my thought process. I neglected it a bit and posted rarely.

One day though, I realized I needed a creative outlet, and blogging is something that I’d dabbled in on and off for years. I love gaming and talking gaming, but rarely have anyone to talk gaming with. I explain more about it here, but in a nutshell, one day I bought a domain name, marked all the existing posts as Private, renamed the blog Nostalgia Trigger, and started fresh, decidely taking a more focused approach to gaming.

Of course, the purpose of this challenge is to re-post my first blog post, but that post was the image above of my name tag from Hershey Park. So I’m forced to extend to post #2 and go with an actual text post, or this won’t be fun at all. Behold.

Geddy’s Glorious Face – The First Post

Killing Yourself with Dairy Queen

At some point, I stumbled upon a picture of one of those limited edition Blizzard plastic cups from Dairy Queen. Noticing that it was absolutely enormous, I went on the DQ website for calorie information and found their meal calculator, an impressively complex tool that lets you calculate calories for full meals, drilling down to all the toppings, fixins, and condiments you can think of, for each part of the meal. Then it crunches the numbers and gives you a handy nutritional label. Terrific!

All I remember thinking is, ‘how the hell would anyone drink that much iced cream through a straw,’ followed by, ‘I wonder how many Dyson vacuums worth of suction it would take to inhale enough ice cream to murder yourself.’

It went down a well-intentioned Wikipedia rabbit hole that eventually veered off topic, and as I sat reading about Lenny Kravitz’ personal life, trying to remember how I got there, I concluded that it was completely impossible to kill yourself with food, at least in a single sitting. This was unfortunate because I really wanted to call this entry ‘Killing Yourself With Dairy Queen’ with the sole purpose of finding the perfect meal with enough caloric poison to murder an average person. The good news is, I run this blog, so I can name things whatever I want.

Getting down to it, the first thing I wanted to do was see how many calories an ‘average’ meal would ring in at. We’re making a lot of assumptions about the typical DQ customer not having a horrendous diet, and eating what would appear to be a reasonable amount of food. Of course, there’s no way the average American wouldn’t want their half pound burger slathered in mayonnaise, so I opted to make it slightly more healthy and choose the condiments and assorted fixins exactly how I would have ordered it.

I picked the 1/2 pound burger, removed the ketchup and mayonnaise (I’m a mustard guy and ketchup grosses me out), but leaving the traditional toppings on, and the bun. Then I added regular fries. I would typically have a water because soda is poison, so no drink. The total came out to *950 calories*. Holy cow!

Check out the numbers

Naturally, after seeing how well this worked, I canceled all my plans for the week and decided I was going to spend a ridiculous amount of time on this calculator gizmo. Let’s discard the fact that 51g of that 459 of those calories are pure fat, 153 of those calories pure, saturated fat. There are more important things to figure out. Let’s assume a typical family going out to eat, and see just how bad we can get things!

I realized that the average person at a DQ will never order a plain burger and regular fries, so I went the more realistic route. DQ is all about their ice cream, right? You know what that means — what better way to wash down that meal with a small ice cream and a medium Coke? And since everyone looks at me like my penis is sticking out of my forehead when I order burgers with no cheese, that must mean that most people like cheese, or that, on occasion, my penis is actually sticking out of my forehead. Let’s assume both for now. I kept the rest of the condiments on the burger as well.

Let’s run the numbers!

Check out the numbers
1560 calories. Alright, alright. Now we’re getting somewhere. That 14 year old eating a typical American fast food meal is eating more than his daily calories in a single sitting. With more than 150% of his daily saturated fat limit! And enough corn syrup to probably keep him in stasis for a year following the sugar crash.

Let’s order for Mom and Dad.

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Average Mom tries to be “health conscious” in this family I just made up, so let’s get creative and see how we can help her out.

For starters, we’ll definitely be going with a salad, so why not the Chicken BLT Salad with Crispy Chicken and some ranch dressing? I mean, it’s a salad, so going fried chicken instead of grilled chicken is OK! However, mom’s sweet tooth won’t be satisfied by this, so let’s finish it off with a Triple Chocolate Brownie Hot Dessert. And why not, throw on some cheesecake piece. Of course, she doesn’t like soda, so she’ll go the healthier route and get some juice. How about a Large Mango Pineapple Julius Original? Running the numbers…

Yep, you guessed it. Click for the numbers.

and we’ve got a potent 1890 calories of carbohydrates and fat! Mom’s gonna be suckin’ down a bottle of Tums on the ride home today, and then passing out for several hours once all the sugar from the drinks and desserts get into the blood stream. Clocking in at a respectable 1890 calories, with almost a daily dosage of sodium, she’s gonna be feeling this one for a few hours.

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But hey, the summer is all about grilling, right? And what do you always make when you grill? Hot dogs. It’s a staple of the American diet! Which brings us to Dad.

We’ll downgrade to the 1/4lb burger for Dad, since he’ll be enjoying it with Beef Chili & Cheese. Cheese is just a big bomb of fat so you just know those calories will be skyrocketing up. I made the Coke a Large cause Dad’s got a lot of food to get through. I also upgraded the ice cream cone to a Large and the Fries to a Large.

A quick click of the mouse, and… yet more numbers!

…Dad is sleeping on the couch tonight. Possibly a hospital bed. 2240 calories in total, almost 100g of pure fat (mostly from cheese, meat, and deep fried starches). 300g of carbohydrates (which is 90g more than I personally try to get every day on a strict 2,000 calorie goal). Even the protein is negligible in comparison at a measly 58g. Sweet jesus! If this doesn’t wreck dad’s stomach, he should go to the hospital anyway, because if he’s used to that abuse, there’s gotta be something wrong.

So here’s an admittedly exaggerated selection of orders from your typical American family. But why stop here, right?

Just for Fun

Let’s throw together a quick narrative about a man named Frank. Frank is a normal-weight American guy who just lost his job. He decides to nurse his depression by consuming copies amount of fast food over at his local DQ for all 3 meals on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Normally, he works out and eats 2500 calories per day. With his normal, healthy routine, at the end of a given week, his grand total calorie count is ~17,500, and this allows him to maintain his current weight and stay in good shape.

Now, assuming that a surplus of ~3,500 calories represents a pound of weight, let’s calculate how much weight he would gain in 6 months. He’ll eat exactly the same thing, those 3 days per week, to keep things simple. I built 3 pretty simple meals that are pretty horrible but not the worst meals you could possibly make.

BREAKFAST

• Country platter
• French Vanilla MooLatte – medium

1410 calories

LUNCH

• 1/4 pound FlameThrower Grillburger
• Beef Hot Dog
• French fries – regular
• Root Beer – medium

1560 calories

DINNER

• Chicken Bacon Ranch Sandwich
• Strawberry CheeseQuake Blizzard – large
• Cherry Coke – large

1750 calories

Running the numbers:

1410 + 1560 + 1750 = 4,720cal each DQ day
4,720cal x 3 days = 14,160cal for 3 DQ days
2,500cal x 4 days (remaining in week) = 10,000cal for 4 other days
14,160cal + 10,000 = 24,160 calories consumed each week
24,160 – 17,500 (maintenance calories) = 6,660 excess calories each week!

So using our 3,500 calorie = 1 pound of body mass rule:

6,660cal x 4 weeks in a month = 26,640 excess calories per month
26,640cal x 6 months unemployed = 159,840 excess calories total

159,840cals / 3,500cal per pound = 45.6 pounds gained in 6 months.

Aside from most likely being dreadfully ill, Frank will have gained 45.6 pounds more or less, simply from eating these larger-than average meals, but only 3 days a week. You might think that this much extra food would only be enough to kick you up 15-20 pounds, but the numbers don’t lie.

Also, as a fun fact, 159,840 excess calories consumed in this extremely gluttonous example would feed almost exactly 100 people for a single day in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (source)

Of course, if you don’t want to go out to eat like a pig 3 days a week to gain 40+ pounds, you can always just order and consume an entire sheet cake (calorie count here) for 7,680 calories, once a week, for those same 6 months. All the money you save on gas only driving to DQ once will be sure to get you a nice hospital bed in your room!

Thanks for reading this insane article that took me about 4 hours to research and put together. Please follow. For the love of god, please follow.

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Postscript

I have no idea why I wrote this article, and I’m sure whatever plan I had fabricated in my head completely fell apart about a quarter of the way through. It’s over-written, full of obvious thesaurus usage, and could have been 1000x times better, if there was actually a way to kill yourself instantly by over-eating. I had just started calorie tracking on MyFitnessPal at the time (this was around mid-2015) so these kinds of things were interesting to me. Unfortunately, nobody else, though.

Writing comedy and trying to be funny on the Internet is hard to do, because unless the readers know the personality of the writer, things fall flat all the time. And as someone who isn’t creatively gifted, communicating your personality through writing and getting a reader to understand your thought process is a tough thing to pull off.

100 posts later and I still haven’t figured it out!

Thanks again to Robert and I hope you all enjoyed, at least a little bit, this train wreck of an article!