Eddie Hall has revealed the rather unexpected secret behind the enormous diet he followed during his strongman career – and it turns out cheesecake played a surprisingly significant role.
At his peak, the former World’s Strongest Man weighed 196kg, which works out at just under 32 stone or 433lbs.
Maintaining that kind of size while training at an elite level required a truly staggering amount of food.
Speaking to Men’s Health UK, Hall revealed he would typically consume around 12,000 calories every day, with his intake climbing even higher when he was training.
“My diet consisted of around about 12,000 calories a day. Sometimes it would be more, sometimes it’d be a little bit less. But I would say, as a minimum, it’d be 10,000 calories a day and, you know, on training days I’d probably be hitting upwards of 14,000 calories a day,” he said.
And these weren’t exactly normal-sized meals.
Hall explained that practically everything he ate had to be scaled up considerably to provide enough fuel for his enormous frame and demanding training schedule.
“If you had a bowl of porridge for breakfast, I would have a bucket of porridge. If you’d have a full English breakfast, I’d have four English breakfasts. You know, everything was just quadrupled,” he said.
There was a reason Hall needed such extraordinary quantities.
He recalled taking part in a study with Staffordshire University where researchers measured how many calories his body required while at rest.
“They worked out if I were to sit in a chair for 12 hours and do absolutely nothing, my body would burn five and a half thousand calories. So I needed five and a half thousand calories just to function,” he said.
However, despite the enormous calorie target, Hall wasn’t simply spending every day eating whatever he could get his hands on.
Later in the interview, the 2017 World’s Strongest Man winner revealed there was actually a rough split to his diet.
“When I was a strongman, like 12,000 calories a day, it was like 70% clean eating, right? And 30% cheesecake. That was my diet. 70/30,” he said.
Hall’s love of cheesecake clearly hasn’t disappeared since leaving strongman behind.
Asked to name his favourite meal during a quickfire round, he opted for steak and chips before revealing the considerably less conventional size of dessert he’d want afterwards.
“I’m going to say steak and good old chips, and then a cheesecake. A full family-sized cheesecake,” he said.
Hall retired from strongman in 2017 and has since reduced his bodyweight considerably, saying during the interview that he now sits at around 25 to 26 stone.
But while the days of eating upwards of 14,000 calories may be behind him, it seems cheesecake remains firmly on the menu.
Featured image credit: Eddie Hall / YouTube / Diana Light / Pexels
