It’s been eleven years now that he’s gone from a diet of meat to a cast of chickpeas and vegetables, while continuing to win titles. Patrik Baboumian, 42, is Iranian-German, and he’s the superhero lookalike Wolverine : a mass of muscle with protruding veins.
Since January, he has been touring the specialized press to present GreenForce, his vegetable protein preparation, and to convince his peers that, yes, you can lift cast iron while using vegetable fuel. His body is the best proof of this, as he explains in a daily interview The Independent.
Patrik Baboumian started weightlifting very early, out of existential urgency. When he was four years old, his father and sister perished in a car accident, only his mother came out alive. “Throughout my childhood, he said, I had this obsession to be as strong as possible, I wanted to be able to lift a car with my bare hands to extract the injured people trapped below.”
At 14, he discovered weightlifting, and won his first cadet regional title in bodybuilding. The following year, he became German heavyweight cadet champion.
Thus began a long succession of titles, which an unforeseen questioning disrupted in 2006. Patrik Baboumian moved in next to a forest, and fell under the spell of the animals that lived there: deer, wild boars, foxes. “something was wrong, he told ‘The Independent’, I ate animals, and at the same time, I wanted to save those I saw. This thought completely turned me upside down and I became a vegetarian..”
The change does not slow down his career, quite the contrary: he wins the title of the strongest man in Germany, and decides to go further, to give up everything that comes from animals. Not just meat, but also milk, eggs, butter, or even cheese.
And, surprise, its mix of seeds, nuts, and split peas works. Patrik Baboumian is even stronger than before, he manages to cover ten meters carrying a 550kg load, goes on record after record, stages himself throwing washing machines or lifting, as he dreamed of, cars in a Netflix documentary.
Today, he now devotes his time to multiplying conferences to demonstrate that it is possible. “It’s not about being the strongest, he concludes, it’s about asking: what do I do with my strength, and what do I want to do with the power that I I have ?“