You know him as the Super-Size Me guy. Morgan Spurlock is the guy who ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days and lived to tell about it in a movie. New York Magazine's food blog, Grub Street, followed the director, now several years later (after a full-recovery?) and looking a little scruffier, for a few days to see how the man eats. He hasn't eaten a Big Mac since the movie, but in the past week, he did dine at Thomas Keller's Per Se, which sounds just as belly-busting as 30 days of fast food.

The Cheesecake Factory is not known for serving health food. In fact, their giant portions can turn even healthy fare into things that you should think twice before eating. Many concerned with calories will ask their waiter to put half of the portion into a to-go box at the same time that the main course is served, which prevents the diner from overeating their pasta, salad, etc. The main thing to avoid there, unless you're not giving the least thought to what you eat, is the cheesecake. Although tasty, their massive pieces often have more than half of your daily calorie requirements. CSPI wrote, in their Nutrition Action Healthletter this month, that the Cheesecake Factory Godiva Cheesecake (pictured) has 1,000 calories and 41 grams of "bad" saturated fat. Unfortunately, they didn't enlighten the readers as to how much fat in total is in the cheesecake, but they did provide a colorful analogy to help picture just how bad it is: "it's like ordering a Pizza hut Personal Pan Pepperoni Pizza - topped with 10 pats of butter - after dinner."

Yum.

If you're willing to toss your diet out the window for a few days (or want to share with a large crowd), you can order this cheesecake online. For a healthier cheesecake, try a vegan version or stick to a bite-sized tart that will give you portion control.

Take a good, long look at the picture to the right. The small size of the photo is misleading because that is a giant apple pie.

Weighing in at 13-pounds, the Levee High Caramel Apple Pecan Pie is the signature dessert of The Blue Owl restaurant and bakery in St. Louis. The pie is made by packing a pastry crust with approximately 18 apples, which are then topped with a caramel, pecan sauce. Since you can't easily ship a freshly baked pie, these pies cab be ordered online and shipped, frozen, straight to your kitchen where you can bake them up yourself. Instructions are included, but from the look of the pie, the biggest challenge will be trying to find enough people to help you eat it.

The big pie sells for $34.95 plus shipping, but if you're looking for something smaller, The Blue Owl also makes a Mini Levee High Caramel Apple Pecan Pie that only weighs 4 pounds for $6.95.

As someone whose second meal yesterday was a late supper at a local sushi bar, preceded by a lunch of a succulent chicken shawarma platter chock full of bits of crunchy skin, the very idea of a near-starvation diet that may increase longevity engenders nothing less than sheer horror.

Adherents of Calorie Restriction follow a diet that leaves their bodies close to starvation in the hopes that such a regimen will radically increase their life span. Or so I learned yesterday after reading a fascinating article about it in this month's New York Magazine.

The author, Julian Dibbell, gives the movement a fair shake. He cites scientific evidence that curtailing caloric intake in mice increases their life span 50 percent. He also makes what I consider a monumental sacrifice by toeing the CR line for two months.

One of the reasons that nutritionists often recommend that you write down everything you eat is that people tend to underestimate how much they're consuming. Those extra calories, whether 10 or 100 per day, can add up over time if your physical activity levels don't change much. And, unfortunately, those 10 calories can be made up by as something as small as a few grapes and translate into a weight gain of about 1 pound per year. To avoid this, try to be honest about how much you eat and pay attention to what you're eating, even when it's "just one" of something. To give you can idea of how many calories those "ones" can have, here are a few from the Seattle Times:

• One Pringles potato chip - 10 cal
• One McDonald's french fry - 5 cal
• One grape tomato - 1 cal
• One green seedless grape - 4 cal
• One M&M - 4.3 cal
• One Jelly Belly - 4 cal
• One broccoli floret - 0.8 cal
• One baby carrot - 1.25 cal
• One cashew - 8.5 cal

There are a few game shows, like The Price is Right, that ask you to guess the price range of a product for a chance to win it. The principle for this game is exactly the same, and though there is no big prize to win, it's still fun anyway. The game is called "Guess the Calories" and unlike the Price is Right, you'll walk away with more than just the knowledge of what a Dyson vacuum costs.  Simply drag the shaded bar over a range of calorie values, trying to guess the number of calories of popular fast foods. I did well when it came to side dishes, but several of the main courses and desserts threw me off. Some of the answers may surprise you. Take the quiz and see how you do - then come back and post your score in the comments!

According to the Guardian's News Blog, next Saturday's edition of the paper will come with a DVD copy of Morgan Spurlock's fast-food-bashing documentary Super Size Me. The DVD giveaway was also mentioned in a recent Guardian article about Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser and the alleged "crisis management" responses from McDonald's concerning Schlosser's upcoming children's book Chew On This and a film adaptation of Fast Food Nation. The Guardian blog post asks readers to send in their recommendations healthy fast food options in Britain.

You know what I was saying about Eastern European food being the next 'big thing' well it now seems that a man lost weight while eating nothing but Czech grub!

Not certain that it would make the pages of a new diet book though as the volunteer copied the Super Size Me documentary by Morgan Spurlock.  Just as Spurlock spent an entire month eating solely at American fast food restaurants - McDonald's I believe - the Czech's menu consisted solely of typical Czech dishes. He was forbidden to exercise and was only allowed to eat fresh fruit and veg if it appeared in the ordered food. He ate solely in pubs, restaurants, cafeterias and food stalls. No exercise either but beer was permitted.

I assume the experiment lasted a month, although the article doesn't specifically say, but during this time the guy lost six kilogrammes and his blood count "is better than before he started the experiment".