Member-only story
The Bag Was Still Warm When I Realized Something Was Wrong…
11:40 on a Tuesday sitting in my car in a parking lot eating a cheeseburger with the dome light off.Not hiding it exactly.I just did not want to look at it too closely if that makes sense.Wrapper still greasy at the corners.Two burgers a large fry a drink basically the size of my forearm and I was not even hungry by the second bite anymore.Kept eating anyway.Nobody really talks about that part — not the eating itself, but the not-stopping. Something about that meal made stopping feel wrong. Like walking out of a movie fifteen minutes before it ends.
Didn't think much of it again until a doctor, months later, glanced at my chart and said my fasting glucose was "trending in a direction we don't love." Trending. Like I was a stock someone forgot to check on.
That parking lot thing wasn't really about being hungry. Pretty sure it rarely is, honestly.
## The Drive-Thru Was Never Really About Food
People talk about fast food like it's mostly a willpower problem. I used to think that too. It's actually a design problem, and nutrition was never really part of the design brief in the first place.
Chains hire flavor chemists. Actual scientists whose whole job is chasing what the industry calls the "bliss point" — the exact…
