Have you ever eaten 8,200 calories in a day? And if you did, what was on the menu? We get insight into what this might look like in a new installment from food writer Bennett Rea’s long-running series Cookin’ with Congress, in which Rea eats the same meals in a day as notable political figures. Watching his series on Instagram and TikTok, you’ll learn how Jackie Kennedy took her coffee, how much orange Gatorade Joe Biden drinks in a day, what kind of martini Gerald Ford had at lunch, and so much more. The most recent president in Rea’s series is the 27th President of the United States, William Howard Taft, who regularly consumed the aforementioned calories and even more in a single day.
As Rea shares, Taft’s menu included everything from meats as far as the eye can see, including both turtle and opossum, to creamy fruit pies, and even a salad or two thrown in, thankfully. But how did Taft, who was famously one of the most gluttonous presidents, do it for so long, and what was the result when Rea tried it himself?
William Howard Taft at one point weighed 354 pounds while he was president. His diet in a single day once included, as Rea shares, “turtle, beef, veal, turkey, bacon, lobster, salmon, more beef, lamb, chicken stock and opossum,” where the beef in question was two 12-oz steaks per day, one at breakfast and one at dinner. Breakfast, Rea shares, was also “three buttermilk waffles with syrup and almost five cups of coffee,” and lunch was “four lamb chops, turtle soup, Bermuda potatoes, a little bit more coffee with a handful of Bon Bons, raspberry jelly topped with whipped cream and salted almonds.” Then dinner was the largest meal of the day, and included two salads, lobster stew and roast turkey, potato salad, peas, salmon, and opossum served with sweet potatoes.
Having regular access to the White House kitchen proved a struggle for Taft when he later wanted to shed some of his pounds, unsatisfied with health factors related to obesity like heartburn and sleeplessness, according to CNN.
The diet Rea takes on, though, is from Taft’s life outside of a strictly regimented weight-loss diet. Rea felt the calorie intake so staggering that he actually didn’t eat for over a day after finishing it, not to mention the sweating and shortness of breath he experienced while eating. The whole day included, as Rea shared, 472g of protein (he even found the turtle and opossum meats to eat; the former from a local farm, the latter his father sent in the mail) and overall took 1.75 hours to cook, 4.5 hours to eat, and $232 to make. The labored breathing, Rea said in one video, was “the real experience,” adding that if he wasn’t talking he was just doing sharp intakes of breath “like a pug.” Whatever Rea was feeling, Taft perhaps felt it too, which led him to make some serious changes.
At one point Taft even sought out a weight-loss specialist named Dr. Nathaniel Yorke-Davies to help him, who reduced his food intake to leaner proteins, steamed vegetables, and significantly fewer carbohydrates, not unlike the modern Atkins diet, History shares. It worked…until it didn’t. Taft went through a roller coaster of weight loss during his time in office, at one point losing some 80 pounds, but he gained almost all of it back. After his presidency, though, he was ultimately able to slim down to less than 300 pounds as a six-foot-two man. So long, two steaks a day!
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