Featured Image Credit: Joel Hansen via YouTube
Topics: US Food
Kerri-Ann Roper
A man from Toronto, Canada has shared how a 30,000-calorie challenge left him feeling “regretful” after he stormed to victory at an event in Thailand.
The food challenge involved eating an entire pig in one sitting and Joel Hansen, the aforementioned Canadian with an iron gut, was undeterred when presented with the 2.5-foot-long dish.
Ticking Thailand off the bucket list clearly wasn’t enough for the adventurer, and he wasn’t alone in the attempt.
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Joel tried the challenge beside a friend called Yong who, conversely, struggled with the challenge to the extent that he had to “call it quits” before finishing it off.
It was filmed and shared via Joel’s YouTube channel, @JoelHansen, where he has over 1 million subscribers as a food influencer and competitive eater.
The challenge was hosted by the As You Wish restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand’s illustrious capital, with the 30,000-calorie meal weighing around 5kg. That’s a ridiculous amount of food to subject a poor stomach to, and so it proved for Joel who felt less than great the next day.
The suckling pig would normally serve 15 people at once, but that didn’t stop Joel from polishing off the £75 plate in less than half an hour.
"It was a bucket list trip, I've wanted to go to Thailand for a number of years,” he said in a YouTube video.
"I thought the challenge of eating an entire pig was absolutely ridiculous. Believe it or not it's something that's been requested a plethora of times.
"People [on my YouTube channel] are always asking me to try and eat a whole pig.
"It's 100% the fattiest thing I've ever eaten in my life, and I eat fatty things for a living. I believe it's upwards of 30,000 calories. It's meant to feed a party of 15-20 people."
Having eaten the whole thing in just 23 minutes, Joel stressed he had no plans to attempt the feat again.
“Your body only wants a couple of bites before it's tapping out,” he said, noting that the meat was “incredibly rich”.
He felt “regretful” once he’d finished chomping through the pig like… well, a pig, and he said that pride in the achievement was somewhat eclipsed when he “just felt like absolute death”.
"I'm glad I did it but I would never do it again," he said.
Seeing as his career centres around chomping through enormous plates, it’s unsurprising that he has since completed many more ridiculous eating challenges.
He recently put yet another “all you can eat” offer to the test by ploughing through a lobster buffet.
There are plenty of examples of him being asked to leave restaurants when it had become clear he was taking their “all you can eat” offers to the absolute limit.
It's worth noting his own words of caution in his YouTube page bio which says: "Joel encourages a healthy lifestyle, not the replication of his video content, and was previously a fitness model."