Game of Thrones” fans are all too familiar with the character known as the Mountain. The hulking giant is perhaps best-known for his, uh, crushing victory over Prince Oberyn Martell.
It turns out the actor who plays Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane, a 6-foot-9, 400-pound Icelandic strongman named Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, also has a powerful diet to match his colossal figure.
Health and exercise scientists at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom studied Björnsson's diet from his Instagram posts and calculated he consumes 12,000 calories a day—five times the daily intake of the average man. But he's also training for the 2016 World's Strongest Man competition when he's not serving as the protector of Cersei Lannister.
Björnsson's individual daily feasts would rival the royal banquets served in King's Landing. Protein is one of his diet's main components. He eats from 50 to 150 grams of protein at every meal, with much of that coming from eggs, beef and chicken.
Fat constitutes roughly a third of the muscleman's daily food intake, but researchers said “heart-healthy” fats like those found in fish make up most of that amount.
Björnsson eats every two to three hours, including a late-night snack of eggs, avocado, almonds and peanut butter. However, one of the researchers said in a release that unlike the Mountain, “Most mere mortals should be able to consume their recommended total daily calorie intake, about 2,500 calories a day, without losing a good night's sleep."
