Regis Philbin
May 27th, 2006, 04:34 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1783637,00.html
'I like to be big'
If there is a 'face of child obesity', it is six-year-old, 15-stone Dzhambulat Khatokhov. Sheer size has made this boy from a poor Russian family a hero in his home town and an object of fascination in the west. Nick Paton Walsh tracks him down
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2006/05/25/ftbyaa.gif
Six-year-old Dzhambulat Khatokhov, who stands 4ft 7in (1.4m) tall and weighs 15 stone (95kg). Photo: Justin Jin
Just sitting down in Dzhambulat Khatokhov's house sucks you straight into his empty world. "There is not a single piece of furniture that he has not broken," his mother, Nelya, laments as I perch on a stool barely held together by a quiver of nails.
Six-year-old Dzhambulat is 4ft 7in (1.4m) tall but weighs a staggering 15 stone (95kg). Since he was three, he has been touted as the biggest child in the world. But the sparsely furnished flat in which Nelya, 38, lives with the boy-phenomenon known as "Dzhambik" and his superlative-free, skinny brother Mukha, 14, confirms that fame does not always go hand in hand with fortune.
Dzhambik is so big that there isn't room for much else in his life. He is hostage to the attention that his enormousness brings him. People feed him; people talk about how big he is. He takes great pleasure in throwing his weight down on to his only real piece of furniture, a steel-framed bed, grinning as it groans under his weight. At times, he is a walking test of how people view obesity - is he tragically out of control, Benny Hill-funny, or happily rotund? Does he himself know or even care?
You may recognise him: his photograph and proportions are often used to illustrate the increasingly extreme nature of child obesity in the west. Five per cent of British 12-year-olds are clinically obese, and a third of American kids aged between 9 and 11 are considered overweight, with experts predicting that a fifth will be obese by 2010.
Yet beneath Dzhambik's image there is often little more than a brief caption, setting out his dimensions, his gift for wrestling, and the fact that he lives in Kabardino-Balkaria, an impoverished republic in southern Russia.
The story of how Dzhambik (pronounced Jam-Bic) got so big is not a long one, his mother insists. He was born, ate three or four times a day, and just grew. But the life that his size has given him is not so easily summed up. This is a story of an ordinary six-year-old boy stuck in an abnormal skin and a world of adult fascination.
'I like to be big'
If there is a 'face of child obesity', it is six-year-old, 15-stone Dzhambulat Khatokhov. Sheer size has made this boy from a poor Russian family a hero in his home town and an object of fascination in the west. Nick Paton Walsh tracks him down
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2006/05/25/ftbyaa.gif
Six-year-old Dzhambulat Khatokhov, who stands 4ft 7in (1.4m) tall and weighs 15 stone (95kg). Photo: Justin Jin
Just sitting down in Dzhambulat Khatokhov's house sucks you straight into his empty world. "There is not a single piece of furniture that he has not broken," his mother, Nelya, laments as I perch on a stool barely held together by a quiver of nails.
Six-year-old Dzhambulat is 4ft 7in (1.4m) tall but weighs a staggering 15 stone (95kg). Since he was three, he has been touted as the biggest child in the world. But the sparsely furnished flat in which Nelya, 38, lives with the boy-phenomenon known as "Dzhambik" and his superlative-free, skinny brother Mukha, 14, confirms that fame does not always go hand in hand with fortune.
Dzhambik is so big that there isn't room for much else in his life. He is hostage to the attention that his enormousness brings him. People feed him; people talk about how big he is. He takes great pleasure in throwing his weight down on to his only real piece of furniture, a steel-framed bed, grinning as it groans under his weight. At times, he is a walking test of how people view obesity - is he tragically out of control, Benny Hill-funny, or happily rotund? Does he himself know or even care?
You may recognise him: his photograph and proportions are often used to illustrate the increasingly extreme nature of child obesity in the west. Five per cent of British 12-year-olds are clinically obese, and a third of American kids aged between 9 and 11 are considered overweight, with experts predicting that a fifth will be obese by 2010.
Yet beneath Dzhambik's image there is often little more than a brief caption, setting out his dimensions, his gift for wrestling, and the fact that he lives in Kabardino-Balkaria, an impoverished republic in southern Russia.
The story of how Dzhambik (pronounced Jam-Bic) got so big is not a long one, his mother insists. He was born, ate three or four times a day, and just grew. But the life that his size has given him is not so easily summed up. This is a story of an ordinary six-year-old boy stuck in an abnormal skin and a world of adult fascination.