New website lets you work out how much your baby weighs in Big Macs

The miracle of childbirth is amazing for many reasons. Having a whole other person bursting out of you like a weird pink alien is already hard enough to get your head around, even before you consider the complicated biology at work. Small wonder that mums, dads and doctors have all been using fairly useless analogies for centuries in order to make the whole process slightly easier to comprehend.

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Many of these comparisons will be familiar to anyone who’s ever set foot inside a maternity ward. Posters and charts showing how a baby grows from the size of a grape to a croissant are simultaneously comforting and quite disturbing. However, one area that has remained relatively untouched by pointless parallels is the realm of fast food. Comparing children to chicken nuggets has always somehow seemed quite tasteless. Now though, this could be about to change.

A new website has been created with the sole purpose of telling users just how much their baby weighs in Big Macs. The service, helpfully titled howmanybigmacsismybaby.com, allows users to enter the birthweight of their child, before providing an accurate measure of how many of the famous sandwiches that adds up to.

Users will almost immediately note that the site seems to have been created with an international audience in mind. The home screen comes with two separate fields allowing users to enter data in pounds and ounces for “American” babies, as well as kilograms and grams for “Literally Everyone Else”.

In addition to working out how many Big Macs are equivalent to a living baby, the website also allows you to take your calculations one step further. A separate field helps you discover how many Big Macs the average foetus will be at each stage of development, ranging from eight to 42 weeks. Using this formula, the site estimates that it takes an average of 19 weeks for a baby to reach one Big Mac in weight. Similarly, by the time the average pregnancy ends, a baby will weigh 17 Big Macs. That’s a lot for anyone to be lugging around.

Though the new Big Mac tool is no doubt enlightening, it is also completely pointless. Knowing your baby’s weight in fast food is unlikely to make you a better parent or a more effective midwifery practitioner. However, it certainly helps to put the experience into perspective for those of us who will never know what it’s like to carry someone else around inside of us. Just imagine the biggest fast food order you’ve ever seen, and double it. Now we can all be more sympathetic.