A British adventurer stuffed down 16 days worth of calories in just 48 hours in an attempt to try and eat the same amount as a tiger shark’s typical meal.
Ross Edgley, an extreme athlete from Grantham, Lincolnshire, decided to challenge himself by going meal-for-meal with one of the planet’s most formidable predators.
He somehow managed to down 41,103 calories in two days, consisting of burgers, pizzas, cheesecakes, two full English breakfasts, seven litres of custard, four Mars bars, four tubs of Ben and Jerry’s and… a lot, lot more.
And what’s even more ridiculous is that the 38-year-old claimed it was surprisingly easy (apparently).
The daredevil said he was inspired to take on the gruelling task while swimming around the entire 1,780-mile circumference of the UK over the course of 157 days back in 2018.
It was during that particular mammoth adventure that he was followed by a huge, harmless basking shark for miles on end.
‘When you’re looking at the best swimmers in the world you only have to look at the apex predator,’ he told MailOnline. ‘And so this fascination turned into a bit of an obsession.’
His challenge consisted of replicating a tiger shark’s feast or famine diet, whereby they won’t eat for months but then fill up on so much food in one sitting that they fill their stomachs completely.
Ross said: ‘Tiger sharks will migrate for thousands of miles without food but then when it finds a whale carcass or a turtle shell it is able to just gorge.’
Tiger sharks feed on almost anything, from crabs to sea snakes, or even other nearby sharks, and also collect food in their throats until it can be digested.
They’re then able to store the meal as fat in their livers, allowing them to go without food for weeks and weeks.
Before he started, Ross fasted for 24 hours and sat in a heat chamber at Loughborough University for around 16 hours to try and rid his body of its nutrients.
He admitted that day was ‘the hardest’ part and said: ‘You can’t sleep because you’re so hungry and your body starts cramping because you’re so depleted of water and electrolytes.’
Ross got cracking by taking in 3,000 calories in smoothies and sports drinks before turning to seven litres of custard because he was ‘dehydrated’ but ‘also needed calories’.
‘It seemed like the logical choice’, he said, adding that his ‘taste buds went to a very strange place’.
By the end of the challenge, Ross had gained 10kg in weight and was convinced he must have matched the amount of calories a tiger shark would consume at meal time.
But when he teamed up with expert Dr Mike Heithaus in the Bahamas to figure out how much a tiger shark eats, they realised it could consume 20,000 in just one bite of a blubbery whale carcass.
Dr Heithaus used a ‘giant lollipop’ and allowed a shark to take a bite in order to measure its intake.
‘There I was thinking I’d done well with 40,000,’ Ross said, ‘and it turns out the tiger shark would have beaten that in two bites.’
In the end, Ross managed to eat the equivalent of 16 days worth of food based on the average 2,500 calories a day guidance for a man.
But that was still only around 28% of what a tiger shark – or the ‘trash can of the sea’ – consumes in one go.
Ross believes humans can gain some useful sporting lessons by looking at tiger sharks and added: ‘Fasting is quite trendy now, but I think we humans could learn a lot from a shark’s primitive fasting and feasting.’
The challenge was carried out as part of a new documentary titled Shark vs. Ross Edgley which will appear on Nat Geo WILD at 8pm tomorrow (July 22).
Later this month, Spencer Matthews is taking on a ‘great desert challenge’ where he will aim to set a Guinness World Record by running 30 marathons in 30 days on sand across the Jordanian desert.
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