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Almost three decades ago a 70 pound baby featured on The Jerry Springer Show, these days he looks completely different.
Well, obviously ‘Baby Zach’, aka Zach Strenkert, looks different as he was just 17 months when he rose to fame and now he’s five days away from turning 30.
Zach was born with a rare genetic condition called Simpson-Golabi-Behmel Syndrome (SGBS), a condition that causes rapid and excessive growth, and during infancy it meant he grew an inch and gained a pound every week.
Without the finances to assess why Zach was so different to other babies, his parents opted to go on Jerry Springer’s show in a bid to find a definitive answer – which would be costly if they hadn’t.
Reflecting on his period of infamy, Zach said: “They presented me as different, which only separated me from everyone else. I was known as the kid that was on TV.
“Nowadays people ask what it was like. They assume my mom was chasing fame and that wasn’t the case.
“We just wanted help with geneticists, which wasn’t easy to come by with our insurance.”
Adding: “We didn’t really get a lot of take-home pay after all the affairs were done. It was strictly to make sure that her kid was okay.”
There was always concern that this cute baby boy – who appeared on the show in 1996 as a toddler – would have issues with him weighing the same as a seven-year-old, while he was a one-year-old.
In fact, the 6ft 5 giant came in at 485 pounds at his heaviest, but when Covid-19 hit and lockdowns were imposed in the US, he used that time to get in shape and slimmed all the way down to 200 pounds.
But more recently, he has bulked back up and is toning up and adding muscles to his physique.
Taking to Twitter in May last year, he tweeted: “I’ve like totally matched my fat and muscle pound for pound, I’m built like a goddamn tank now. I’ll post an update eventually.”
He appeared on the show again before Covid hit and the audience was all hear for him and his humor.
“Nowadays I’m a competitive gamer actually,” he shared.
“That’s just by chance, like yeah, I just played it because I liked it, it’s hard for me to do some things because of my size – I’m a big guy but you know I own that, I’m like the hottest fat guy around.”
Then speaking backstage during the interval, his mom told Springer: “I carried him until he was a hundred pounds, now it’s his turn to carry Mama.”
