I Have Become an Expert in: Competitive Eating

While I'm fanscinated with this phenomenon, two things irk me about it. One, the competitions (like Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest) strike me as grotesque pageants of gluttony that put hundreds of pounds of food where they don't need to go. I like to think that anybody out there who's truly hungry -- and I mean Hungry -- is spared the coverage of this "sport".

("You know what I'd like? One goddamn hot dog.")

But even if you feel a nagging wrongness while watching these eating contests, you still have to admit that the eaters themselves are a marvel in a Ripley's Believe It Or Not sort of way. They're the other thing, though, that makes this American pastime unsettling. How do they do it? Especially two of the smallest competitors, Takeru Kobayashi and Sonya Thomas, who were long ranked #1 and #2 worldwide? How does a 105-pound woman eat 44 Maine lobsters in a single sitting? String Theory?

A couple years ago, I watched a decent documentary on, of all things, MTV, as an episode of its True Life series ("I'm a Competitive Eater"). It featured Takeru during his "training", as he would grace a buffet with his presence and proceed to empty nearly a hundred plates of food and stack them high on his table. From what Takeru-san told the filmmakers, his capacity to stomach 50+ wieners, not to mention improve on his personal best each year, relies on his ability to...

1. Expand his stomach.

Takeru weight trains and exercises in order to reduce his body fat percentage to the single digits (something accomplished in spite of his... distinctive diet). He says that the decreased fat in his body helps his stomach balloon to championship proportions.

2. Pre-condense the food.

The key to this strategy, however, seems less clear. His success at packing masses of food into his belly owes much to the Kobayashi Wiggle and some other nuances, like his eating posture and the way he soaks the hot dog buns in water before stuffing them in. Sure, it all seems like minutiae once we get down to it -- 63 hot dogs relocated inside this small man's body -- but it all adds up. I mean, hell.

If Takeru has a "secret", it is this: a game of Tetris goes on inside that kid during competitions.

And hot dogs are all "long pieces," so imagine how much easier that makes things.