Friday, May 26, 2006

209 pound 6 year old kid

6 yr oldIf 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.

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 or 209 pounds) . 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?

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