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Champion competitive eater shares his training, victory

Posted by Andy Dworkin, The Oregonian July 15, 2008 19:34PM

The average American eats 2,200 calories a day. Sunday in Lincoln City, Joey Chestnut ate 12,000 calories of pork ribs in 12 minutes.

To see video of the world's No. 1 competitive eater discussing his love of pork, his training regimen and his dramatic July 4 hot dog-title victory over the great Kobayashi, go here.

To read more about competitive eaters and what it does to their body, read the story about Joey Chestnut below.

Get ready, get set, gorge.

Competitive gluttons chow down massive amounts of food, but what does that to do the body?

Joey Chestnut hops up and down in the steamy New York summer, his face sunburn-red, one hand pressing hard against cheeks swollen to Dizzy Gillespie proportions by a soggy, balled-up hot dog.

It's his 33rd dog in five minutes. He's only half done.

"There's definitely pain involved in these contests," says Chestnut, the world's top-ranked competitive eater. He beat Japan's glorious glutton, Takeru Kobayashi, in a sudden-death dog-off at Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Chestnut followed that meal with another title defense Sunday in Oregon, when he downed 8.05 pounds of pork ribs in 12 minutes at Chinook Winds Casino's Smokin' at the Ocean festival.

"The critics who say it's gluttony or unhealthy, I agree," Chestnut says. "I know it's not healthy what we're doing. But it sure is fun."

Healthy would be a stretch. But as competitive eaters regularly prove, the human body has an amazing capacity to hold a massive amount of food, process it and return for more, with surprisingly little damage.

"The stomach is really just a very stretchy organ," says Dr. Emma Patterson, medical director of the Legacy Good Samaritan Obesity Institute. "If you think back to the caveman days, we'd probably take down some sort of big animal, pig out and not eat for a few days."

Patterson knows bellies like Chestnut knows franks. She performs bariatric surgeries, drastically reducing the size of obese patients' stomachs to limit their food intake.

She grabs a 20-ounce bottle of iced tea from her desk. The human stomach is normally about twice this big, Patterson says. Then she grabs the small plastic cap: She tries to make to make it twice that big.

Patterson's a fan of competitive eating. "I find those things fascinating to watch, actually," she says. And gurgitators -- competitive eaters' chosen moniker -- may have a healthier relationship with food than many jockeys, gymnasts and wrestlers, who can become anorexic or bulimic trying to keep their weight down.

Eating for contests is not a disorder, or "in any way contributory to any eating disorders," says Dr. James Hancey, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University -- though "to my mind, it's the height of stupidity."

Stupid is thinking you can jump straight into the echelon of top gurgitators. It takes lots of practice.

Chestnut says he trains months in advance for the July Fourth contest, the Olympics of competitive eating. He fasts for a day or two, then gorges on hot dogs. "Every time, I'd try to push myself to a new limit," he says.

The International Federation of Competitive Eating warns against training without medical help nearby. You're unlikely to bust a gut -- that's hard to do, Patterson says. But you might choke. Paramedics attend every official eating contest, mostly for that reason.

And don't think a big gut will make you a great gurgitator. Obese people don't have bigger stomachs than the slender. They just fill them more often.

Few top competitive eaters are obese. The excess fat mass in obese people would push in on the stomach, Patterson says, making it harder to compete. And it's actually a lot of physical work to breathe and chew in rhythm and force down that much food.

Chestnut says he's starting to put on excess weight. His official "bib sheet" lists him as 230, though he tops 6 feet. Kobayashi, now the world's No. 3 eater, weighs 160 pounds. No. 6 eater Sonya Thomas weighs 105. No. 7 eater Rich LeFevre, who finished second at Smokin' at the Ocean, weighs 130 pounds. His wife, Carlene, once the world's No. 7 eater, also worked for years as an aerobics instructor for Richard Simmons.

Though their early dates involved 2-pound steaks with salad and a sundae for dessert, the LeFevres now eat mostly veggies and chicken to stay slender. A lot of veggies and chicken, of course.

"I don't sit down and eat one apple. I eat three or four apples with a handful of nuts. And an ounce of cheese," Carlene says. "I'm not one of those dates who leaves half their dinner."

On contest days, though, gurgitators hurl healthy eating out the window. So Chestnut will gulp 45 pulled-pork sandwiches, or 47 grilled cheese, in 10 minutes. "Kobe" still holds the cow brain record: 57 brains -- that's 17.7 pounds -- in 15 minutes.

Carlene LeFevre once ate roughly 5 pounds of canned Spam in 12 minutes. She finished second to her husband, who ate 6 pounds. He's also eaten 247 pickled jalapenos in eight minutes. He washed those down with nearly a gallon of chocolate milk. Then he went for an ice cream cone, as he and Carlene do after each competition.

Ah, yes, the aftermath. Even if your belly doesn't burst after 8 pounds of pork ribs, what happens in the end?

Surprisingly, the eaters don't all rush backstage to throw up what they just threw down. Regurgitation -- a "reversal" in competitive eating parlance -- is looked down on in the sport, though it sometimes happens. Carlene's Spam was so salty she reversed it about 20 minutes after the finish line.

"Eventually the food settles to the bottom of the stomach," Chestnut says, "and I just want to take a nap .¤.¤. I'm on a pretty much liquid diet for the rest of that day and the next."

Still, what goes in must come out. "It'll all pass through," Patterson confirms. "They'll be pooping for days."

--Andy Dworkin;
andydworkin@news.oregonian.com