By Don Farmer
Just when you think you have heard it all another story pops up to boggle your mind.
And so it was on Saturday when news emerged of a 25-year-old man weighing 431kg claiming to be his country’s strongest man.
Pakistani Arbab Khizer Hayat wants to be a weightlifting champion and is apparently capable of stopping cars and tractors from progressing forward simply by leaning his bulk into them.
That may, or may not be so, but what Mr Hayat should be more concerned about is his weight and his likely brief life span.
At 431kg he weighs, in the old measure, just under 68 stone and although he says he is in good health, he isn’t or at least he will certainly not remain so for much longer.
The clue to his looming demise, probably within a year or two, is his diet.
The self-made man mountain eats 36 eggs for breakfast along with 3kg of meat and washes it down with five litres of milk.
You could have a metabolism capable of processing that mass of nutrients at the speed of light and still die young.
Quite frankly that amount of food at a sitting is ridiculous gluttony that cannot be explained away by trying to justify it as a need to maintain body weight in the vain hope of becoming a champion weightlifter.
It sends a wrong message to everyone, to the food addicted, to those trying to keep weight under control, to young sportsmen, everyone.
Not that many years back a competition was promoted in a western country, Britain I think, to see who could eat the most hard-boiled eggs at a single sitting.
The winner scoffed 72 hard-boiled eggs to take the prize and landed himself in hospital, seriously ill.
Then there was the era of the yard glass, a time it was considered fun to stage drinking contests to see who could gulp down a so-called yard of beer in the quickest time.
A death during a contest took the gloss off that madness and the yard glass basically disappeared from public view.
I often wonder what reaction doctors and nutritionists have when they read of excesses practised by the likes of Mr Hayat.
All their good work shot down in flames, perhaps?
