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Fat Dead Elvis

Dr Karl takes a look at the life and death of the big guy! And yes folks, The King really is dead. Most likely.

Elvis Presley was such a great singer, and was such a legend, that even today, some people claim that he is still alive. He died on the toilet of his mansion, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee - apparently, from constipation! Now one of the contributing factors to the death of Elvis Presley was his diet. When he died, in 1977 at the age of only 42, he weighed 159 kilograms! But, according to some recent research, he could have lost a lot of weight by fidgetting.

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!

The basic element of Elvis' daily food intake was a 30-cm long bread roll, stuffed with bacon, peanut butter and strawberry jam. Each one had 42,000 calories, and in his final days, he ate two of them per day, together with little midnight snacks of hamburgers and deep-fried white bread.

Elvis was addicted to food, and in the end, it killed him at a tragically young age.

But one thing he could have done, to lose a little weight, was fidget!

Professor Leonard Storlein, from the Department of Biomedical Science at Wollongong University, was the one who accidentally discovered the weight loss benefits of fidgetting. He was measuring the total metabolic rates of humans. He used a device called a whole-room calorimeter. It's just a small, sealed, room. Because it was sealed, he could measure the total amount of oxygen his volunteers used, and how much carbon dioxide they made. From this, he could work out how much energy his volunteers needed just to keep alive, and how much extra they burnt up in moving around and fidgetting.

He found that this extra energy component varied from 200 calories per day (for somebody who just sat around) to 1,200 calories (for a dedicated fidgetter). This 1,000 calories is an amazing large amount. According to Professor Storlein, "A person would normally run 10 kilometres just to get rid of 300 calories". So 1,000 calories is equivalent to a 33 kilometre run. In other words, your dedicated fidgetter, twiddling their thumbs, and bobbing up-and-down, and crossing-and-uncrossing their legs, can burn up as much energy as you would need to run 33 kilometres!

Now this would not have really helped Elvis, even if he was a serious fidgetter. Fidgetting would have chewed up 1,000 calories per day, leaving him with another 99,000-or-so calories to burn up.

But one thing we do know is that Elvis Presley, The King, is really dead, even though various TV shows and tabloid newspapers say that he's alive. We have the words of the doctor who did the autopsy on Elvis. Now in an autopsy, the doctor removes and examines the heart, the brain, and various other essential internal organs. To get to these essential organs, the doctor has to do various cuts and incisions. To quote the doctor, "If he wasn't dead before I did the autopsy, he sure was afterwards!"

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