An Iranian man claims he stopped consuming food one day in 2006 and has relied solely on sweetened fizzy drinks for energy ever since.

58-year-old Gholamreza Ardeshiri claims that the mere sight of food makes him nauseous and that he has been surviving on water and fizzy drinks like Pepsi and Coca-Cola for the last 17 years. It all started one night in 2006, when he woke up with a strange feeling in his mouth, one that he just couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many doctors he visited. In the end, he decided to shun food permanently and has been living a perfectly normal life ever since. His family doesn’t eat in front of him, because just seeing them makes him sick, and he gets all his energy from carbonated drinks. He drinks three large bottles of soda per day and insists that he never feels hungry.

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“I had a strange feeling, I felt like an object like hair was inside my mouth, I felt that the head of this hair was inside my mouth and the end was inside my stomach, no matter what I did, it was not possible to remove this hair,” Ardeshiri recalled about the night he first felt that funny feeling in his mouth. “It was like the hair was tugging in my throat and I felt like I was suffocating, it was so tight that I didn’t know what to do. I can’t really describe it, but it felt crazy.”

Everyone recommended a different doctor, so he went to see several of them, but no one could diagnose his condition. There was no hair in his mouth, but he felt like there was, so he was advised to see a psychiatrist. That didn’t work very well either, so he just decided to give up food entirely and live on soda exclusively.

Gholamreza Ardeshiri told Iranian reporters that the first time he drank a glass of soda, he felt energized like never before so he decided that the delicious concoction would be his alternative to food. He claims that he lost 32 kilos since he started drinking soft drinks, but other than that he has had no serious health problems in the last 17 years.

The 58-year-old Iranian man is fully aware of the risks associated with the consumption of sugar-rich fizzy drinks, but he claims that he undergoes health checks routinely and has even undergone an endoscopy, all of which confirmed that he is healthy. He consumes these sugary drinks almost exclusively, claiming to drink only half a glass of water and maybe a glass of tea every week.

Ever since he started living on fizzy drinks, Gholamreza Ardeshiri has been feeling more energized than before. He now sleeps just 4 hours a night and spends his nights watching TV and solving puzzles.