The Heaviest Ever

If you think the living were big, what about the dead? This man and woman broke all the records, and they paid for it with their lives.

Heaviest Man Ever: Jon Brower Minnoch, peak weight 635kg

Jon Brower Minnoch actually holds who records.

Not only was he the biggest man who ever lived, with a peak weight of 635 kilograms, he also holds the record for the most documented weight ever lost, a whopping 419 kilograms.

Minnoch had always been a big boy, weighing 133 kilograms by the time he was 12. As well as dietary problems causing the weight, doctors believed around half of his overall mass was fluid, a common problem in the obese. After being hospitalised in 1978 he was put on a strict diet, where he underwent an amazing transformation. However, after he was released he couldn’t keep it off, and the fluid retention made it worse. Minnoch died in 1983, aged just 41.

Heaviest Woman Ever: Carol Yager, peak weight 720kg

There’s some debate about just how much Carol Yager weighed at her peak.

Her former partner claimed that at her heaviest weight she was around 1600 pounds, or 727 kilograms, which wouldn’t just make her the heaviest woman, but the heaviest person on record.

She claimed that she began to put on weight in response to being sexual abused as a child, but denied eating more than the average person. In 1993, a year before her death, she was admitted to hospital and lost around 236kg of weight, most of which was fluid. However, the damage to her body was too great. When she died at aged 34, from kidney failure caused by morbid obesity, Yager weighed 544kg.

Now that you’ve seen the biggest, the worst that it gets when it comes to obesity in the world, what do you think we should do about it?