Former McDonald's now home to healthy eating program
She says she dropped 62 pounds without ever having to diet
Marcia Cole says people would be a lot healthier if they thought of the food they choose to eat as medicine. She now owns a brand new "food pharmacy" outside of Grady Hospital that used to be a McDonalds.
ATLANTA - Marcia Cole says it is funny to think she was able to kick her decades-long fast food habit in this former McDonald's restaurant outside Grady Memorial Hospital, where she was once a regular.
"Yes! I used to eat here," Cole laughs. "Every time I had an appointment, I would eat here, after my appointment!
However, in April of last year, at over 200 pounds, the now 67-year-old landed in Grady's emergency department with dangerously high blood sugar.
That is when Cole ended up here in the former McDonald's, now the Teaching Kitchen at Jesse Hill Market, where, Cole says, she had a breakthrough.
"When I walked in here, I said, "You would never know it used to be McDonald's! But, yeah, I changed everything. I don't eat fast food anymore."
Cole worked with Teaching Kitchen manager Dhana Blissett, who teaches Grady patients living with food insecurity or diet-related health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, how to use food as a kind of medicine, to get better control of their health.
Here approach is simple.
"If we consume a plant-based diet, we can lower our blood pressure, we can lower our cholesterol level, we can get our diabetes in check, and we're actually seeing that in our patients here." Blissett says.
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The Teaching Kitchen at Jesse Hill Market is a collaboration between Grady, the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and Open Hand Atlanta.
Grady patients, referred by providers, can take cooking and nutrition lessons, and go home with bags of healthy ingredients to make the dishes at home.
"There is also a "food pharmacy," where patients can bring a prescription written by their provider for fresh produce and nutritional staples -- all of this free.
"Sometimes the patients are scratching their head thinking, 'Oh, I'm probably going to get a can of beans,'" Blissett says. "They're not anticipating, you know, 24 or 44 pounds of food."
Marcia Cole says she has become a smarter shopper.
"When I go to grocery shopping, I'm in there for hours now, because I'm forever reading labels," she laughs. "If anything is over a certain percentage, I don't buy it, and I check for carbs, I check for saturated fat, extra sugars, uh-uh! I find substitutes."
By phasing out processed and fast foods, Cole says she has lost 62 pounds, and her blood sugar is back under control.
She is proud she did it without dieting.
"There's no such thing as diet," Cole says. "You just have to learn how to eat right, and, the thing is, you have to want to do it to succeed. That's very important to me. You have to want to do it."