#polyphagia

(via Why Is Everyone Posting Memes About Tarrare?)

He was this French guy who had a medical condition known as polyphagia that caused him to always be hungry. He was constantly hungry and could and would eat literally anything and apparently he smelled like crap. His is the most egregious case of polyphagia in recorded history. According to legend, he was caught eating corpses and at one point was suspected of eating a 14-month-old...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

Charles Domery was a Prussian and french soldier who became renowned for his unearthly appetite. He is reported to have eaten 174 cats over the course of a year, and was known to consume up to 2.3kg of grass if no other food was available to him. During one instance during his military service he was observed to attempt to eat the severed leg of one of his fellow soldiers while they were at sea, however another member of the crew wrestled it from him and threw it into the ocean.

Unlike his contemporary Tarrare (who also had an exceptional appetite), Domery had an entirely normal physical appearance, he was noted to be polite, pleasant, of average weight and height. The only notable thing about his physicality was a tendency to be prone to profuse sweating while sleeping and when eating large amounts of food. He was also noted to never vomit, no matter the volume of what he had consumed.

While serving as a soldier he was captured by the British who conducted experiments on him to test the extent of his appetite and his ability to consume unusual food. He was fed raw cows udder, 4.6 kg of raw beef and 12 candles - a long with several large bottles of Porter. During this time he did not urinate, defecate or vomit.

Dr Johnston of the Royal Navy noted:

The eagerness with which he attacks his beef when his stomach is not gorged, resembles the voracity of a hungry wolf, tearing off and swallowing it with canine greediness. When his throat is dry from continued exercise, he lubricates it by stripping the grease off the candles between his teeth, which he generally finishes at three mouthfuls, and wrapping the wick like a ball, string and all, sends it after at a swallow. He can, when no choice is left, make shift to dine on immense quantities of raw potatoes or turnips; but, from choice, would never desire to taste bread or vegetables.

Like many a 13-year-old boy, Polish soldier Charles Domery had an insatiable appetite and soon found that army ration of two skimpy portions of bread and meat were insufficient. He soon got into the habit of supplementing his diet by eating four or five pounds of grass a day. But even that was not enough. Charles developed a penchant for raw flesh, bull’s liver being his particular favourite,…

"Polyphagia and hormone-related conditions

Aside from diabetes, polyphagia can be a symptom of the following hormone-related conditions:

Hyperthyroidism or Graves’ disease: In these conditions, your thyroid releases too much thyroid hormone, which plays a significant role in regulating your metabolism (how your body transforms the food you eat into energy). Elevated levels of thyroid hormone speed up your metabolism, which means your body is using calories faster than normal. This can cause constant hunger and weight loss.

Premenstrual syndrome (PMS): Premenstrual syndrome describes symptoms that show up one to two weeks before you start your period and return at the same time each month. One possible symptom is polyphagia. This is due to the spikes in the hormones estrogen and progesterone and decreased levels of serotonin (a neurotransmitter).

This isn’t poetic, I’m just really fucking hungry like 99.9% of the time and I fucking hate it 🤬

The WHO has classified Polyphagia and assigned it the ICD-10 code R63.2 for medical classification purposes under the range - Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified .

The WHO has classified Polyphagia and assigned it the ICD-10 code R63.2 for medical classification purposes under the range - Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified .