CARE YOUR HEALTH

It's a bitterly cold winter day and students on the University of Minnesota campus are bundled up, hurrying to their next class. Wim Hof, dressed in shorts, sandals and nothing else, appeared from the doorway of a school building.

He's known as 'The Ice Man."

Scientists can't really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.

From the Arctic Circle to Mount Everest

It's an ability he discovered in himself as a young man 20 years ago.

"I had a stroll like this in the park with somebody and I saw the ice and I thought, what would happen if I go in there. I was really attracted to it. I went in, got rid of my clothes. Thirty seconds I was in," Hof said. "Tremendous good feeling when I came out and since then, I repeated it every day." It was the moment that Hof knew that his body was different somehow: He was able to withstand fatally freezing temperatures.

Hof began a lifelong quest to see just how far his abilities would take him. In January of 1999 he traveled 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle to run a half-marathon in his bare feet. Three years later, dressed only in a swimsuit, he dove under the ice at the North Pole and earned a Guinness World Record for the longest amount of time swimming under the ice: 80 meters, almost twice the length of an Olympic-sized pool.

When he didn't experience frostbite or hypothermia, the body's usual reactions to extreme cold, his extraordinary ability started to get the attention of doctors who specialize in extreme medicine.

Dr. Ken Kamler, author of "Surviving the Extremes," has treated dozens of people who tried to climb Mount Everest, and instead nearly died from the frigid temperatures. He couldn't believe it when he got word of a Dutchman making the ascent with no protection other than a pair of shorts.

"People are always looking for new firsts on Everest. It's been climbed so many times now, people climb it without oxygen, they … they climb it with all different kinds of handicaps. But no one has come close to climbing Everest in those kinds of conditions," Dr. Kamler said. "It's … it's almost inconceivable."

Millions of dieters would give their right arm to be afflicted by the illness that is plaguing John Perry.

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Mr Perry, 59, can eat whatever he likes - including unlimited pies, burgers and desserts - and never get fat.

He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat.

Mr Perry regularly eats Chinese takeaways, chips, chocolate and clotted cream, but his weight has remained stable at 11st 12lb.

He told the Sun that he used to be a chubby child, but at age 12 the fat dropped off "almost over night".

Doctors thought he was refusing to eat or had a stomach ulcer, he said.

He initially tried to eat more to gain weight, but it had no effect.

“I didn’t like being slim at first. As a teenager playing football I was so thin I got embarrassed taking my shirt off," he said.

“I used to eat loads of chocolate to try and put on weight but I couldn’t.”

Mr Perry, of Ilford in Essex, endured a decade of tests before the illness was diagnosed. It finally emerged that his body produces six times the normal level of insulin.

Doctors have admitted that the condition would be a "slimmer's dream".