During most of the 1990’s I worked in fast food. Long hours, low pay, and unhealthy lifestyle pretty much was the definition of how I lived during those 8 years. I worked my way through the ranks to assistant manager. I was kind of a Hank Hill for burgers and chicken, depending on what part of the decade you caught me in. But, I learned a lot. I learned how to run a business, manage employees, to budget, project sales, labor and inventory needs and how to drive sales.

Recently I visited one of my old stomping grounds and surprisingly enough, one of my old colleagues still worked there. I went through the drive thru and ordered some food and one of my favorite secret indulgences, peach tea. I did not specify size. It used to be in the industry instead of asking, we would assume medium. But during that decade, we had a mindset change. It started with the upsizing trend, which, started as the result of the combo trend. With the upsizing trend, you would hear something to the effect of “would you like to upgrade that medium to a large and get 12 more ounces for just 10 cents more?” I mean, heck, a small is 16 oz and was a dollar, so this was a bargain.

Then came what I like to call implied upsizing. As seen below:

Employee: “Welcome to Burger World, would you like to try our new triple mega artery clogger burger?”
Customer: “Yeah, I’ll have a triple artery clogger, fries, and a coke.”
Employee: “Ok, that’s a triple artery clogger, large fries and a large coke, would you like a slice of our mint chocolate chip fudge brownie Hershey kiss pie today?”
Customer: “No that’s it”
Employee: “Ok, please drive thru and I’ll have your total at the window.”

Nowhere in this conversation did the customer ask for larges. And it would have been the same order if they had asked for any other entrée with any item that had different sizes. If they don’t say a size, assume the largest. If the business has an extra large size then extra large is what’s read back. That’s the rule. If the customer doesn’t want the biggest, they will tell you. In areas of the country where people say “regular” instead of “medium,” businesses started turning requests for regular into large. And it was read back that way, so that’s how you wanted it. It was all about the bottom line.

As for me, I ate the stuff left and right. For days on end, I’d have a diet of burgers, fries and soda. I’d gain some weight here and there, but not so much to really concern me, after all, I worked sometimes 14 hours a day, running back and forth, on my feet most of the time.

Then I started getting older. I was about to turn 27, in a nowhere job making no money and getting hassled by a boss because I did her job as well if not better than her and she was twice my age. I was just tired of it. So I quit. I found a job a few months later at a call center. It was a whole new world to me and seemed to mirror fast food structurally, so I enjoyed it. I moved up fast and became a manager within a year. But I still ate all the time. And now, I was sitting down 14 hours a day. Between November 1998 and October 2001, I ballooned up from 350 lbs to 550 lbs.

Fast forward 7 years. I am sitting in a nutritionist office in preparation to have lap band surgery. The nutritionist explains that as one of the restriction after the surgery, I can never have carbonated beverages again. She asked me, what did you drink yesterday? I sat there and I said that I had 2 64 ounce jugs of Mountain Dew, then I had 3 one liter bottles of Mountain Dew, then had 3 20 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew Live Wire and a 20 ounce Sprite to settle my upset stomach (I had an umbilical hernia.) No water, no coffee, no tea, no juice, just Mountain Dew. That’s about 310 ounces of soda in 1 day, or 4,300 hundred calories. That’s not including my food.

So, yeah, I was a bit out of control. I developed unhealthy eating habit, so my lap band was a saving grace. So far I’ve dropped about 150 pounds from my top weight of 650 and I am only 298 days out. So I hope to continue seeing good results as time goes on.

But all of this had me thinking about the “bigger, better, more” mentality that is thrust upon us today. I grew up with 7 television channels in Boston. And the channel stayed on the TV for at least the length of the show. I have a remote now and over 500 channels and as soon as a commercial comes on, I flip channels. When we go to the store, we look the most we can get for the least price, same with restaurants.

I am slowly learning that more is not better, it is just more. Quality is important; quality of food, health, relationships and of life. And although excess is ok some of the time, (pampering and rewards for ourselves are good once in a while) moderation is key.

But, I would not be writing to you if I did not go down that path, and I am a better person for learning that lesson. After all, the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I now know what William Blake meant.