terratogen wrote:

The average person needs about 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day to keep alive, even if they just lie in bed and do no exercise. People doing very heavy work, such as an Arctic or Antarctic explorer pulling a sled across frozen trackless wastes, needs to eat about 10,000 calories per day. Even then, they have difficulty in eating enough food to get their necessary 10,000 calories per day. When Mike Stroud and Ranulph Fiennes crossed Antarctica on foot in 1992, they could eat only 5,500 calories each day. That's more than double the intake of the average person, but even so, they each lost about 23 kilograms in weight.

With Elvis, you can forget about your average 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day, or even the 5,500 calories per day of your average Antarctic explorer. Before he died, Elvis was eating about 100,000 calories per day! That's more than enough to keep your average multi-tonne Asian elephant alive - or, enough to keep you or me alive for nearly 60 days!

Can the human body even digest 100,000 per day? This article also says constant fidgeting burns over 3x more calories than running 10 km.

Well, he did die of constipation.... ;-)

His diet sounds like something Homor Simpson would dream up. Twice a day, a 30-cm long bread roll, stuffed with bacon, peanut butter and strawberry jam. Add a little Whitney Houston special and bam! one dead king. Too bad.

-janelane, fidgeting my way to good health

terratogen wrote:

The average person needs about 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day to keep alive, even if they just lie in bed and do no exercise. People doing very heavy work, such as an Arctic or Antarctic explorer pulling a sled across frozen trackless wastes, needs to eat about 10,000 calories per day. Even then, they have difficulty in eating enough food to get their necessary 10,000 calories per day. When Mike Stroud and Ranulph Fiennes crossed Antarctica on foot in 1992, they could eat only 5,500 calories each day. That's more than double the intake of the average person, but even so, they each lost about 23 kilograms in weight.

With Elvis, you can forget about your average 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day, or even the 5,500 calories per day of your average Antarctic explorer. Before he died, Elvis was eating about 100,000 calories per day! That's more than enough to keep your average multi-tonne Asian elephant alive - or, enough to keep you or me alive for nearly 60 days!

Can the human body even digest 100,000 per day? This article also says constant fidgeting burns over 3x more calories than running 10 km.

I'm going to say, this is just plain wrong. The main item in his diet they list as providing 42,000 calories looks like a miscarried 0. It's a 30cm bacon, peanut butter and jam sandwich. That's a 10" sandwich (sizable but not enormous). A POUND of RAW bacon on that is about 2600 calories, with the calorie count going down as it gets cooked. A full cup of peanut butter is about 1500 (try opening your mouth after that!) and a full cup of strawberry jam will come in around half that, call it 750. Add the bread in and it's getting close to 1/10th the quote.

Even if you batter the sucker and deep fry it, I can't imagine how to get that close to the 42,000 quoted. To get to 100,000 a day? He's eating 100 sticks of butter a day, on top of the sandwiches, washing that down with a bottle of Wild Turkey, a case of Bud, shoving his mug directly under the spigot of a funnel coke machine (last summer's "fried coke" mess) with a gallon of ice cream and three pies and a couple dozen donuts for desert. I'm calling this Myth Busted.

Mike the Usurper wrote:

I'm going to say, this is just plain wrong. The main item in his diet they list as providing 42,000 calories looks like a miscarried 0. It's a 30cm bacon, peanut butter and jam sandwich. That's a 10" sandwich (sizable but not enormous). A POUND of RAW bacon on that is about 2600 calories, with the calorie count going down as it gets cooked. A full cup of peanut butter is about 1500 (try opening your mouth after that!) and a full cup of strawberry jam will come in around half that, call it 750. Add the bread in and it's getting close to 1/10th the quote.

Even if you batter the sucker and deep fry it, I can't imagine how to get that close to the 42,000 quoted. To get to 100,000 a day? He's eating 100 sticks of butter a day, on top of the sandwiches, washing that down with a bottle of Wild Turkey, a case of Bud, shoving his mug directly under the spigot of a funnel coke machine (last summer's "fried coke" mess) with a gallon of ice cream and three pies and a couple dozen donuts for desert. I'm calling this Myth Busted.

Heh: I found this:

As described in the UK Sunday Times, 24th December, 1995, page 3 article,
"Revealed: the Elvis Presley killer diet", a forthcoming British special on
Elvis Presley's eating habits, titled "Arena", details the Presley diet.

The Elvis Diet:

Breakfast (5 pm) - 5,000 calories
Six large eggs cooked in butter with extra salt, 1 lb of bacon, half a
pound of sausages, 12 buttermilk biscuits

Dinner (10 pm) - 84,000 calories
Two "Fool's Gold" sandwiches [a jar of peanut butter, a jar of
strawberry jam, one pound of crisp-fried bacon on a baguette x2]

Supper (4 am) - 5,000 calories
Five double-hamburgers and deep-fried peanut butter, mashed banana
sandwiches.

Misc. - other snacks as required between meals

Elvis total dietary intake in calories averaged a minimum of 94,000 *per
day*. The article highlights that an adult Asian elephant (many tons in
weight) has a normal diet of 50,000 calories per day. The article quotes
a spokesman for the British Nutrition Foundation as saying, "I do not know
how he did it... The Elvis diet would fuel a normal man for a month." The
article continues, "Eventually this condition [consuming 94,000 calories
worth of food per day] contributed to his death -- caused, as Graceland has
it, by a heart attack or, as the coroner describes it in Arena, 'a terminal
event on the commode'."

Kind of makes me want to check out this book.