A professional eater has revealed how she once passed out during a food challenge and had to be taken to hospital for treatment. You can see her taking on a strongman in a burger-eating contest in the video below.
Leah Shutkever is a professional eater, having left behind a steady career in interior design after realising that she had a natural talent for scoffing huge plates of food.
Now, she has 307,000 subscribers on YouTube, 160,000 Instagram followers, and has broken 26 Guinness World Records in the process.
It’s fair to say she’s come a long way in a short space of time.
However, there are risks involved in her work.
After all, you can’t just go about eating massive amounts of food, swallowing kiwi fruits and clementines whole, and attempting speed-eating challenges without any practise.
Former bodybuilder Leah also has to train hard and fast ahead of her sporadic challenges in order to keep her body – which she describes as ‘a machine’ – in good working order.
Whilst attempting a challenge in Japan she once ate so much food that the blood started to leave her brain, causing her to pass out and leaving her requiring hospital treatment.
What’s more, she claims that she had asked on several occasions for the challenge to end, but was made to keep filming until her body shut down.
Leah was taking part in a challenge for a Japanese TV show that – unsurprisingly – never made it to air when she lost consciousness.
She told LADbible: “I blacked out in a food challenge once, the circumstances were much different to ones I’ve been in before.
“I have low blood-sugar levels and I think that’s maybe something to do with the oxygen in my body.
“I was doing a food challenge in a very hot room, [it was] subterranean with loads of people and lots of lights and cameras.
“We were getting to the end of it and I felt myself blacking out because there was just not enough air in the room.
“I got taken to A&E and the doctor basically said because [I’d] ingested so much food the oxygen went from my brain to my stomach to digest and I passed out.”
It’s scary stuff, but it didn’t deter her from pursuing her career down the competitive eating path.
“Since then, nothing like that has happened”, she continued.
“He [the doctor] did all my bloods and everything and said ‘otherwise you’re completely healthy,’
“There was no other explanation for this to have happened”.
Nowadays, Leah can pick and choose what challenges she wants to attempt, and she has certainly learned a lesson from this frightening experience.
She explained: “I tried to pull the plug like three times during filming because I know what my body is telling me.
“[I was thinking] ‘something’s not right and I need to get out’
“They kept rolling and kept rolling.
“We were eating about four kilos of their ‘take’ on British food, so it was a pretty misrepresented platter of British food.
“In general I’ve learned a lot. I don’t like to live by regrets.
“I feel like all of these experiences are ones to be learned from, and moving forward now as a woman doing these things that have never been done before at this capacity, I need to be able to really state my boundaries and be able to say no when things aren’t cool.”
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@shutkeverofficialTopics: Food And Drink, Weird, UK News
Tom Wood