Chankonabe (pronounced CHAHN-koh-NAA-beh), the meal traditionally eaten by sumo wrestlers in training, is a boiled stew consisting of vegetables, fish, chicken, tofu and a side of rice. “It’s something that was easy to fix with the materials that they had at hand,” explained Leonard Thomas, President of the North American Sumo Federation. Rice is abundant in Japan, there are no difficult steps to the preparation and it’s a dish that can easily be made in mass. Other ingredients depend on the recipe, but it’s not uncommon to see shrimp, noodles, raw eggs, beer and various other sea life. Some chankonabe recipes also include beef, pork or raw horse, but meat from four-legged animals is often superstitiously avoided, since a sumo wrestler falling to all fours during a match is a loss. The nutritional value, according to Kevin Carter, sumo wrestler and writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, ” … is quite healthy. It’s high in protein. The cholesterol comes from the rice. It’s not overly spicy so it’s not bad on your stomach. It’s high in vitamins because of the fresh green vegetables – there’s not a lot of vitamin C, but everything else is pretty good.”

But the weight gain is less dependent on the contents of the food – and more on the quantity that’s devoured, coupled with the lack of activity during digestion. Professional sumo wrestlers in training eat only twice a day, with chankonabe as their first noontime meal. Traditionally, the junior wrestlers prepare the chankonabe in giant pots, and the senior wrestlers eat first (as an incentive to move up the totem pole, the younger or lower ranked wrestlers are served last – assuming there’s any food left once the seniors have eaten their fill). Following the meal, the wrestlers take a three to four hour nap immediately after eating, which is vital to their weight gain. The second meal of the day is smaller, unless a wrestler is losing weight from the strenuous workouts, in which case they’re encouraged to eat sugar-heavy foods. Often, the workouts are so exhausting that competitors sweat off their weight by the end of the day and end up barely making the 165-pound minimum requirement.

According to Carter, body fat percentage among professional sumo wrestlers ranges anywhere from the teens to the forties. “Konishiki [the first American sumo champion] was about 42 percent, but he weighed 650 pounds at the time. Musashimaru [American “yokozuna,” or grand champion], at his heaviest, was in the upper twenties and he was about 500 pounds, which means there was a huge amount of muscle on the guy, but he was still very fat.”

But not every sumo wrestler traditionally eats chankonabe; one such case is the six-foot eight, 700-plus pound Manny Yarbrough, the heaviest living athlete in the world. Yarbrough entered the Guinness Book of World Records at 704 pounds in 1999. His weight today? “I have no idea,” said the friendly, light-hearted beast of a human. “I honestly don’t know – and I’m kind of afraid to find out.” There’s no secret to how Manny gained so much weight – his destiny has been etched in extra-extra-large stone since childhood. “In sixth grade, I was five-foot eleven, 263 pounds. In ninth grade I was six-foot four, 320.” As for his eating habits, he’s had chankonabe before – which he describes as “dynamite” – but he doesn’t follow the eating habits of other professional sumos in training. Manny’s diet is simple: “I’ll basically run across whatever I run across when I run across it.” However, Manny has made an interesting observation of professional Japanese sumo wrestlers when they go into retirement, and the healthiness of chankonabe may play a part in this trend: “With the Japanese guys, the weight melts right off of them when they retire.”

Chankonabe isn’t offered in most Japanese restaurants, but if your stomach demands a taste of this fine stew (or you need to bulk up for your backyard sumo wrestling league), you can experience it for $10.95 at Sanppo in Japantown (1702 Post St., San Francisco; 415-346-3486). Here, one serving of chankonabe is presented in a mini-cauldron that easily holds enough food for three people. Served with sides of miso soup, salad and rice, Sannpo’s chankonabe includes noodles, chicken, fish, vegetables, raw egg and a lemon-flavored sauce, and is indeed dynamite. And if you have the sudden urge to put on a diaper and wrestle large men, don’t resist. Just go with it. See you in the ring.