British lifeguard Daniel Pennock has been eating sausages and chips for dinner every night for the past 22 years. But the 26-year-old father-of-two is now so desperate to kick the habit that he’s pleading for someone to come forward and help him in any way possible.

Daniel says he ate a normal diet as a baby, but his obsession with junk food began at age four, when he simply refused to have anything else for dinner. Worried that he might give up eating all together, his mother agreed to give him sausages and chips every evening, and the habit stuck. “I don’t eat anything apart from junk and I’m fed up,” he said. “I don’t think I have ever eaten a vegetable in my life. I do eat bananas and apples, but anything else makes me physically sick. I have sausage and chips every day. I’ve tried eating other things, but I just can’t keep them down. I want to get it sorted out, once and for all – not just for me, but for my family.”

His current diet consists of toast for breakfast, a chip sandwich for lunch, and four sausages, fries, and bread for dinner. This has caused his weight to balloon up to 266 pounds in the past, although he has managed to lose some weight recently. His bad eating habits have also affected his romantic relationships because he wouldn’t take any of his girlfriends out for meals. “My ex-partner and I have spoken about it and she said ‘if you were normal and we could have gone out for meals and stuff it might have been different,” Daniel told the Pontefract and Castleford Express. “But I was coming home and she was having her food, and I was making mine – it wasn’t really like we were a family.”

Photo: YouTube caption

And it’s not like he hasn’t tried eating other stuff, but anything but potato chips and sausages seems to make him seek. “People say ‘you’re fussy or picky’ but I’ve tried to eat other things. I have tried chicken before, but I was actually sick before it got to my mouth. I have tried pinching my nose, but I feel sick just thinking about it.”

Daniel has recently been diagnosed with selective eating disorder, a condition that causes sufferers to only eat foods that they consider ‘safe’. Not much is known about the condition, except that it could be triggered by a life-threatening situation such as choking on food. That doesn’t seem to be his case though, as neither he nor his parent remember any such incident occurring during his childhood. “I’ve racked my brain and asked my parents to work out how all this started, but it’s a mystery,” he says.

Since being diagnosed, Daniel has managed to lose weight by working out, but he hasn’t been able to say no to his favorite dinner. He also found a specialist in London who will attempt to treat his selective eating disorder, but he first has to save up for the £300 sessions.

Selective eating disorder isn’t as rare as you might think, though. In the past, we’ve featured the cases of a woman who had been on a pizza-only diet for 31 years, and of a girl who had been eating only noodles for 11 years. Daniel at least eats some fruits from time to time as well.