When former AFL player Shaun Hampson returned home to wife Megan Gale and their two kids after being a contestant on Australian Survivor 2019, he couldn’t stop eating.
For 31 days, he had endured intense hunger. The brutal conditions of the show saw him lose a staggering 11 kilos in just one month.
Speaking to Mamamia following his exit from the Channel 10 show on Sunday night, Hampson remembers the acute pain of hunger as being the hardest aspect of competing on Survivor – second only to not being able to speak to his loved ones.
“I’d never experienced hunger like that before,” he tells Mamamia. “I’ve done diets or I’ve fasted at times, but you’ve always got the thought in your head knowing that you can just go to the pantry or the fridge at any time.
“You don’t have that out there so you’ve got hunger from just eating rice and beans and then you can’t just go to the pantry and get food. You start dreaming about food. It’s 80 per cent of what you talk about, it’s really full on.”
So what exactly was his diet? “I was having two handfuls of rice and half a handful of beans [each day]. And then we were having a little bit of coconut as well.”
Despite his 11 kilo weight loss, Hampson recalls putting the weight back on within days of eating normally again.
“I had 18 days in the jury [villa] and I put on about seven or eight kilos, but it wasn’t the good weight. It was the bad type of weight and it just happened so fast and I realised then that I had to slow my eating down.
“I think you go into a primal thing where you go so long without food, that when you’ve got it in front of you, you have to eat it because you don’t know where your next meal’s coming from – so it was really hard to get out of that mindset and go back to normality.”
