35-year-old Debbie Taylor loves cooking big meals for her boyfriend and teenage son. But when the time comes to sit down at the table and dig in, she just pulls out a packet of Beef-flavored Monster Munch crisps instead. In fact, that’s about all she’s been eating for the past decade!

Debbie, a hotel chambermaid in Harlow, Essex, is so paranoid about food that she actually takes a packet of crisps when she goes out to restaurants, and munches on them while her boyfriend Gerald indulges in a traditional meal. She takes them everywhere. For example, when the boyfriend took her and her son Luke for a holiday in Spain, she actually packed a separate suitcase full of Monster Munch for the trip!

“I’m not a fan of the cooked meal,” she wrote in a life and style experience article in The Guardian a few years ago. “I’m much happier with Monster Munch crisps – beef flavor; I wouldn’t touch pickled onion. When I open the bag, I check if they have enough beef coating on them; if it’s not enough, I’ll throw them away.”

Read More »

In a bid to achieve a tiny waist, 25-year-old  Aleira Avendano has been wearing a tight corset 23 hours a day, for the past six years. The result? She literally looks like an hourglass, with 34DD breasts, an enlarged derriere, and a shockingly slim 20-inch waist.

Aleira said that she began ‘waist’ training as a teenager. Her skinny core now attracts attention wherever she goes. “People stop what they’re doing and stare – everywhere I go I get attention,” she said. “People shout at me in the street – they can’t believe that figure is real.”

She does admit that wearing a corset was uncomfortable at first and it took her some time to get used to. But over time she got so used to it that her skin would start to itch when she took it off. And she says that she actually loves wearing it now. “I’m completely obsessed with belts and corsets – I even sleep with them on,” the busty Venezuelan model said. Read More »

For over four decades, Egyptian woman Sisa Abu Daooh was the sole breadwinner in her family, which is highly unusual for the patriarchal society she lives in. What’s more unusual is the way she did it – by dressing herself like a man! Now 64, Abu Daooh is being honored as the ‘ideal mother’ by the Social Solidarity Directorate of Luxor.

Sisa lost her husband when she 21 and pregnant. After the birth of her daughter, she was left with no money and no source of income, either. Since the local culture did not permit women at the workplace, she had no option but to dress like a man. Her disguise consisted of a  ‘jilbab’ – a loose, full-length robe with wide sleeves – along with a white turban, or a men’s hat called ‘Taqiyah’, and black shoes.

Read More »

When the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant went into meltdown, after the devastating tsunami in 2011, most of the locals fled to overcrowded temporary shelters. So did Naoto Matsumura, but the brave man soon decided return to his home town of Tomioka, just to take care of the many animals left behind! And even though the radiation levels are dangerously high (17 times higher than normal) in this area, Matsumura says he isn’t going anywhere.

He now spends most of his time running a charity along with a few supporters, taking care of animals left behind in the evacuation zone. “I have two cats, one dog, one ostrich, one horse, 31 cows and four wild boars,” Matsumura proudly declared.

He started off by taking into his care the animals that were abandoned in his hometown. He described how most of the pets were still tied up, because locals had believed they would be back home soon. Matsumura took it upon himself to feed the animals every day. “They couldn’t stand the wait, so they’d all gather around barking up a storm as soon as they heard my truck,” he recalled. “Everywhere I went there was always barking. Like, “we’re thirsty” or, “we don’t have any food.”

Read More »

Jia Haixa and Jia Wenqi are the most unlikely pair of environmentalists we’ve ever come across. The former is blind, while the latter is a double-amputee. Yet, they’ve managed to use their symbiotic relationship to plant over 10,000 trees in the past decade.

Haixa and Wenqi began their beautiful partnership when they were unable to get jobs due to their impairments. They have now become each other’s eyes and hands, and taken on the task of transforming a three-hectare stretch of riverbank in Yeli village, in north China’s Hebei Province.

“I am his hands,” said Haixia. “He is my eyes. We are good partners.” The 53-year-old was born with congenital cataracts that blinded his left eye. Then, in 2000, he lost sight in his right eye as well after a work-related accident. Wenqi, on the other hand, lost both arms in an accident when he was only three years old.

Read More »

Seven-year-old Kautilya Pandit is what you would call a walking, talking encyclopedia, with the capacity to absorb information ranging from geography to biology and current affairs. He also dabbles in economic statistics, politics and pretty much any other subject you can think of. Within three months, the little kid managed to memorize information about 213 countries, their population, GDP, source of income, currency, religion, culture and heritage.

Kautilya, a resident of Kohand Village in Haryana, India, is now a national celebrity – he regularly travels to schools across India, answering live questions from other kids, on stage. In one of his latest appearances, he was asked unusual questions like the total surface area of Vatican City, the GDP of the UK and more. He was able to answer them all with ease.

Read More »

Lots of people sell products they don’t believe in, but in Trevor McKendrick’s case, you just can’t ignore the irony. That’s because Trevor is an atheist who sells Bibles for a living – and something just doesn’t feel right about that, even to him!

Interestingly, Trevor did not consciously choose his profession – it sort of fell into his lap by accident. He happened to be out at a dinner with his family in February 2012, when he found out that a relative was making $8,000 to $10,000 a month just by selling iPhone apps.

Trevor found the prospects too good to ignore, so he decided to step into the app business himself. All he wanted to do was to make about $600 a month, which would have been enough to cover his rent. So he went on to the Apple store to find an app that was making a lot of money, but “sucked”.

Read More »

At an age when people usually start forgetting things, this Chinese woman has managed to do the opposite – she’s actually memorized the entire Oxford English-Chinese dictionary from cover to cover!

Li Yanzhi, 51, from China’s Shaanxi Province, can not only recite all 220,000 entries in the 2,458-page dictionary, but can also accurately describe their meanings. Ms. Li works as a lecturer in Financial English at Xian Transport University’s Economic and Banking School. But she needs an extra income to be able to support herself and her 26-year-old autistic son who is unable to care for himself. A mother and divorcee of 20 years, Ms. Li said she took on the Herculean task in the hope of receiving more translating work.

Read More »

At 35-year-old, Robert Paulat is practically a pensioner in the world of male modelling, but somehow he is still signed with Vanity Fair, one of the most prestigious agencies in Europe, and getting plenty of lucrative contracts. He says it’s all thanks to his uncanny likeness to a Ken doll, the result of over 40 plastic surgeries he’s had done throughout his career.

Botox, plasma treatments, and operations to change his nose and mouth – Paulat has been through them all. And he’s not ashamed to admit that it was these procedures that helped him maintain a youthful, photogenic look for so long. “I am obsessed with the idea of raising people’s self-confidence through improving one’s appearance,” he said. “I think that proves I am not narcissistic because there is always something I’m not happy with.”

Read More »

Long eyelashes are generally considered beautiful, but this Ukrainian man’s extra-long lashes are just plain creepy. 58-year-old Valery Smagliy, from Kiev, believes that he has the world’s bushiest eyelashes, a trait that he attributes to a secret ingredient in his diet.

Valery said that he started eating something, and noticed that it made his eyelashes grow really long and thick. And when he realized that it made women jealous, he decided to keep the ingredient a secret in order to market it later. “Women would stop me in the street and ask me what the secret was, they can see that they are real and not fake,” he said. “And whether it’s man or woman, most people don’t seem to pay much attention when I’m talking to them because they’re always looking at my eyelashes.”

Read More »

People often believe that female bodybuilders have to compromise on their feminine charm in order to lift heavy and win competitions, but Japanese bodybuilder Tomoko Kanda is proving them wrong. The 48-year-old has dedicated her life to bodybuilding and weight training, but also managed to retain her feminine beauty.

Tomoko, who lives in Abeno-Ku, Osaka, was introduced to the world of bodybuilding during her years working for the Department of Defense at Yokota Air Base. “I got fat very easily because of my body type, so a soldier there told me about weight training,” she recalled. “I first did it to lose weight. I was 23 at the time, a late bloomer.”

Read More »

15-year-old New Yorker Noa Mintz is one of the youngest people in the world to own a successful start-up. The teen entrepreneur is the founder of ‘Nannies by Noa’, a popular baby sitting agency that she started after a number of bad personal experiences with babysitters, but because she is still in school she needed someone to handle business for her. So she just hired a CEO.

Although Mintz agency was doing well, she simply couldn’t find time to handle the ‘excruciating hours’ and ‘hundreds of emails’ along with homework. So she decided to delegate the responsibility of running the business, and her decision has paid off. The agency now serves almost 200 clients in the tri-state area, providing them with baby sitters as well as full-time nannies.

It all started three years ago, when Mintz, a sixth-grader, spent the first half of her summer vacation interning at a nonprofit. Subsequently, she spent the second half brainstorming for her nanny agency. It stemmed from the fact that Mintz, the eldest of four, always found flaws with her own babysitters. She realized that there must be a better way of pairing families with the right caregivers. “For what you’re paying, your kids should be more stimulated,” she explained. “At seven, I would tell my mom, ‘You need to get more bang for your buck.’ It would drive me insane.” So Mintz accepted a challenge from her mother to find a better babysitter for their family, and succeeded. Soon, she started helping out her mother’s friends too.

Read More »

Lauren Singer is a sustainability-conscious entrepreneur who has produced almost no waste in the past two years, proving that a trash-free lifestyle is indeed possible.

Lauren majored in environmental science at NYU, and it was during her student years that she began working towards a ‘Zero Waste’ goal. Today, the New Yorker does several things on a daily basis to reduce waste, including making her own toothpaste, deodorant and laundry detergent. She also founded her own eco-friendly company, ‘The Simply Co’, through which she plans to sell her homemade products.

Lauren regularly writes about her experiences of a Zero Waste life on her blog ‘Trash is for Tossers’. “There were two moments that brought me to a trash-free, waste-free lifestyle,” she revealed. “The first was my senior year of college when my professor Jeffrey Hollender emphasized the importance of living of living your values, and made me think about my own personal environmental impact.”

Read More »

In the the past 40 years, New Jersey resident Bill Bresnan has written over 10,000 love letters, notes and cards to his wife Kirsten – that’s almost one for each night of their marriage. The couple’s unique love story was recently covered by the media, and Bill and Kirsten, both 74, spoke about the secrets of their successful marriage.

The couple met when Bill was teaching a class back in 1974, and Kirsten happened to be his student. “She was this beautiful Northern European woman who struck me like a bolt of lightning,” Bill said in an interview with ABC News.

“Not long after meeting in class Kirsten and I began commuting to and from Long Island, together, on the Long Island Railroad.” And that’s when the practice of writing notes began. “We exchanged notes, drawings, and little scribblings on paper napkins over coffee on the train.”

Read More »

Saying 19-year-old Alecia Pennington is suffering an identity crisis would be an understatement. Having grown up in a homeschooling Christian household, she never got a birth certificate or social security number, so from an identification point of view, she doesn’t exist.

Alecia is one of the nine Pennington siblings – children of James and Lisa Pennington, group leaders of the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) and members of the Hill Country Home School Association. In a YouTube video Alecia posted on February 9, she claims that following her home-birth, her parents failed to file a birth certificate or record of any kind. She also alleges that they never got her a Social Security Number, have no school records or hospital records simply because she was never taken to a school or a hospital.

“This leaves me with nothing to prove my citizenship,” she explained in the video. “I am now 19 years old and unable to get a driver’s license, get a job, go to college, get on a plane, get a bank account, vote.”

Read More »