Muhammad Ali’s Appetite

When training hard, human beings can put away a lot of food and calories. I believe Muhammad Ali on this one.

 

Tex Cobb claimed he once ate 50 tacos at a sitting.

Then was when he was in college at Abilene Christian (he either played football there or was hanging out with football players IIRC) and he was poor as were his buddies. So they went to a place that had an all-you-can-eat taco buffet and basically they ate so much the place discontinued the buffet or either told them they weren’t welcome back.

Tex is, of course, prone to exaggeration but his punch line was he did it because “carbo loading was the wave of the future,” haha.

 

“Norton broke my jaw in round 2”. “But I fought on cause of my belief”. Bollocks. Even Ken said 11 or 12. Anything to make himself look super human. Ali is an all time great and arguably GOAT but he didn’t half talk ****. I eat all this and that but can train it off. Utter crap. In a few years time he’ll have leapt over skyscrapers and eaten bullets fired at him. Keep things real folks.

 

Ali was fighting often and always in the gym so I think he rarely had time to pur on weight in the 60's. After winning the title in 1964 he took some time off, though, and came back to the gym weighing 230+ lbs.

 

I believe that this was Muhammad Ali's dinner meal prior to his title defense against Cleveland Big Cat Williams on Nov 14 1966.

 

Well he did fight Superman and aliens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_vs._Muhammad_Ali

 

Probably nothing exciting given that he'd be training as a bodybuilder. Lift heavy, eat 3500 calories a day to bulk, 6-8 weeks before filming starts, eat 1200-1500 calories a day and do a ton of cardio. He was already lean and fit, had slowly been putting on lean mass since the Fresh Prince days -- by Independence Day (which came out in 1996, so probably filmed in 1995), he already had decent size (and given that he's 6'2", was probably already around 200lbs)

 

Not that much food for a big full time athlete. I have eaten more when I was young and am smaller than Ali and not fat.

 

"Rumble young man, rumble!"

 

These are heavyweights who train like titans, what you expect.

 

Just to add to some of the information about other heavyweights eating large amounts, I do recall Joe Louis mentioning in his biography some food feats, including eating an absurd number of bananas right before training and getting scolded by Jack Blackburn for it (it made him sluggish).