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A friend of mine recently told me about an article she read that illustrates how sumo wrestlers put on as much weight as possible. I went home and found lots of information about how they do it. Thinking that if I tried to do the opposite, it might help me lose some weight. The most quick and concise article about how sumo wrestlers gain weight was found here: Here’s how they do it in a nutshell.
1. Skip breakfast. By depriving their bodies of food after eight hours of sleep, their metabolic rates stay low.
2. Exercise on an empty stomach. If their bodies have
no food, their metabolic thermostats are turned down even lower to conserve fuel.3. Take a nap after eating. The Sumo secret for gaining weight is that, after eating, they sleep for at least four hours.
4. Eat late in the day. Going to bed with full stomachs means that their bodies must respond to the huge flood of nutrients with a rush of insulin, forcing their bodies to store some of it in the cells as fat instead of in the muscles and organs as nutrients.
5. Always eat with others in a social atmosphere. According to leading researchers, a meal eaten with others can be at least 44 percent larger and with 30 percent more calories and fat.
I feel like I have a pretty good handle on all of these areas already, so I’m not expecting great weight loss results from doing the opposite of a sumo…but I thought it was pretty interesting nonetheless.
J.D.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Red // Feb 25, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I know some people who will be very depressed to see 1 & 3.
Coffee is breakfast, right?
I’m surprised to see the nap one, just because countries that have the mid-day nap culture don’t seem to be adversely affected.
2 Susan // Feb 25, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Here’s another one: eat… A LOT!!! Consume massive amounts of calories so as to encourage fat storage.
That’ll get you in fine Sumo form!
Avoid regular, heart-raising, sweat-inducing exercise for better results.
3 Billy // Feb 25, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Thanks for sharing these weight loss tips in such an engaging way.
I definitely agree with the skipping breakfast item. Don’t do it, ever, if you want to lose weight. You need to keep your metabolism up.
And, Red: Coffee is not breakfast (sadly), although it is if you have a meal with it.
4 Jacob @ Early Retirement Extreme // Feb 25, 2008 at 11:19 pm
I’ve done 1-4 consistently for over a year and I’m leaner than ever quite possible because I am fat burning most of the time because I am not eating.
So consequently, I’m depriving myself of calories for 22 hours at a time. I switch to fat burning very easily. I never experience sugar crashes. I eat a huge meal once a day. The fat that is stored at night is burned off the next day. The key to gain or loss is net calories.
One can make a similar argument against eating a lot of small meals. Insulin levels are continuously high because the blood sugar is getting bumped every other hour. The body becomes dependent on blood sugar and thus fat burning never switches one. Also if you skip a meal, you crash. The digestive system never gets a rest (and neither do the teeth).
BTW the metabolic rate depends on muscle mass. The timing of the eating is not very significant. More here: http://nutritionhelp.blogspot.com/2007/01/deconstructing-nutrition-when-you-dont.html
5 AB // Feb 26, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I’m with Susan. Sumo Wrestlers eat between 6k and 20k cals a day. It’s pretty much all rice and a soup made from fatty pork, prawns, eggs, cabbage and bean sprouts. This will get you fat faster than any daily habit.
They do about 4-6 hours of intense physical activity 6 days a week, however, which is why actively training sumo wrestlers have far fewer health problems than one might expect for someone weighing that much. Also, their diet, like many countries that aren’t the US, doesn’t contain the additives ours does which also helps health.
So what you can really learn is don’t eat 3 to 10 times what you should calorically. hehe.
6 mike // Mar 1, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Ieat once a day rare ly twice Ismoke 2 packs of cigs a day I stay awake unreal amounts of hours on the weak ends I walk quite a bit the rest of the week i sit on my duff not to mention I drink an average of 12 to 15 beers a day and it aint lite beer its full flavor 5.5 % alc by vol im 6 ft tall 42 yrs old wt 160 to 165 lbs im in fair shape im not sloppy looking or do i have a belt over hang i can eat a pound of m& m s every day befor i go to bed for weeks on end and my weight never changes thats a very bad diet most ppl would not be alive if they did that look at the sugar intake that i have
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