Braun Strowman - © ring ready - WWE

How To Eat Like A WWE Fighter – And Live to Tell The Tale

We often see novelty posts about how much – and what – athletes, professional wrestlers and man-mountain movie stars eat every day to maintain their huge, muscular physiques. It’s unbelieveable! Until you consider the outgoing side of the Caloric ledger…

Braun Strowman - © 2023 WWEBraun Strowman: Legendary WWE mega-multi champ and full-time pro Big Guy…

‘Big’ is as ‘Big’ does

I think we’ve all seen those fan photos of NFL linebackers, WWE wrestlers, body-builders and olympic athletes coming off the service line at fast food joints carrying trays stacked with multiple burgers and fries, tons of tacos or buckets of chicken. It’s no lie that they eat a lot more than your average citizen, for number of good reasons:

  • They’re bigger (usually taller as well as bulkier) than the average person and simply need to burn more fuel just to maintain  those physiques;
  • They are more active than the average person, burning a lot more Calories during their often epic activities;
  • They probably work out more and for longer durations than the average person;
  • They are used to eating more and have larger abdominal cavities and organs to accommodate larger volumes of food.

But the key word to their whole phenomenon that is people like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnston are simply BIG.

Not talking fatties, here!

Lets make it clear up front. We’re not talking about your common-and-garden fatties, here. For practical purposes, those include folks who suffer from eating disorders or have simply cultivated lifestyles based on sedentary activity profiles and heavy hand-to-mouth habits.

My late birth Dad – who was always active during his life – used to point to average fatties and whisper, with notable exasperation – “Jeeze! There’s enough there to make three normal people!” He was right, of course. But he never ‘believed in’ the idea of eating disorders. If you were fat, you were obviousl lazy. If you were skinny, you were either a wimp or had the misfortune of having bigger, hungrier folks ahead of you in the family buffet line.

Few ‘casual fatties’ in previous genrations

Notably, there were few ‘casual fatties in Dad’s generation – which grew up during the Depression – than in mine, which came after the Second World War. He was brought up with different, conservative attitudes toward food. Even after the War, he often scowled and muttered, “Waste not, want not!” or complained that his Mother fed a family of 5 on a single can of SPAM. Why did we al need ‘seconds’ at supper time?

His mother was responsible for his outlook, of course. I wish I had a buck for every time I stood in her kitchen helping clean up after a big extended family feast supper, and heard her ‘tsk’, while scraping perfectly good food off the dinner plates of those who took more than they could (or should) eat. The pantry cupboard doors at her and granddad’s summer place down at the farm were emblazoned with the mottoes such as: ‘Enough is Equal to a Feast’.

Now, avoidable obesity is characterized as an epidemic, and more than half the population in many ‘advanced’, ‘educated’, and ‘developed’ countries is at least overweight.

But what about the ‘big’ as opposed to the merely fat?

What one ‘big’ guy eats every day

Now consider the contrast between habits and life styles of the ‘big’ versus the merely fat.

‘Big’ folks are invariably active, in one way or another. Which is to say, they’re either athletes or body builders, or work in steel mills or lumber yards. They may eat more than average, but their life styles demand it.

And what does it take to fuel those largest of human machines? When you sit down and figure it out, it usually comes out to something between 5,000 and 6,000 Calories a day. And that does that consist of?

A generic ‘Big Guy’ menu

WWE star Braun Strowman ( AKA: ‘The Abominal Strowman’, and ‘The New Face of Destruction’) (real name: Adam Joseph Scherr) stacks up, literally, like this: 2.03 m / 6 ft. 8 in. tall; 176 kg / 385 lb. and 39 years old.

Here, by his own account, is what he eats every day:

  • 7 to 8 pounds of cooked proteins
  • 4.5 to 5 pounds of rice
  • 3 to 4 pounds of veggies;and
  • 2.5 to 3 gallons of water per day

Some observations:

  • He drinks only water – no alcohol or fizzy, sugary beverages
  • The amount of rice he consumes, when you work it out, is about the same percentage of his total food intake that the rice accounts for in the diet of your average Asian adult
  • His veggie intake is moderate compared to what the current national food guides call for in the context of someone his size. I’d like to know how much of those veggies are cooked and how much are raw. (Raw being considered so much better you…)
  • My source doesn’t say what the protein content of his daily diet consists of; how much fat it contains, or whether it’s red meat, white meat, fish and seafood or a mixture. I suppose, when you’re burning it up as fast as your body an process it, that doesn’t really matter.

For a Big Guy, his diet actually sounds pretty reasonable. More balanced and diverse than your or mine, probably.

One more observation: Cosidering what food costs these days, I’ll freely admit I couldn’t afford to be a pro athlete!

On the whole…

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that Double Jumbo Smashburger he’s enthusing over in the image above is an exception to the usual; a treat for being good the rest of the week!

~ Maggie J.