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I love food, and not surprisingly, I often suffer from stomach upsets when I overeat in general, let alone when I'm competing.
Military caregivers play an essential role in the recovery process of our veterans and are more than deserving of our support.
I love to eat internationally and do eating contests everywhere. Traveling around, meeting people, and doing different things.
Everything at a baseball game is pretty much health food if you subscribe to the theory that you're eating what makes you happy.
So now I'm 'the hot dog guy,' which isn't bad. I take it in stride. It's not like it was my goal in life. I'm having fun with it.
I travel pretty much every weekend of the summer. And then during the winter, I still do appearances and a couple contests here and there.
It was a hard decision to give up a normal job. I worked hard to get through school. You go from building a fire station to an eating contest.
It was hard for me to take competitive eating serious at first. When I made people happy, I became addicted to that. It's been a fun, fun ride.
When I started doing contests, I didn't look at it as a sport, but when I realized I was looking at it that way, I had to acknowledge it as a sport.
They don't sell the Nathan's hot dogs hardly anywhere in the West Coast. So I have to special order them, and I just end up getting Nathan's to ship them to me.
When I'm eating I try to make sure I can breathe through my nose the entire time. If I have to breathe through my mouth, there's no way I'm eating or swallowing.
Make sure I'm chewing, swallowing, and breathing, my whole body is working together. I can just find a rhythm and keep going and going and going. It's my love of food.
There are times when I'm not eating buns if I'm on a low carb diet. I'll have hot dogs and romaine lettuce, but if I'm at a baseball game, I'm always eating a hot dog.
The hardest is foods I am not familiar with. Gyros, I lost that one; I don't like tzatziki sauce very much. I did kimchi in Korea, which was rough: fermented cabbage and spicy.
Mom only gets angry when I don't visit her enough. She raised six kids to be 100 percent independent and work for everything we achieve. I mean, we don't expect anything for free.
There's no better feeling than knowing I'm going to break the guy next to me. His body will shut down, and I will keep eating. Then I will look out and see a crowd of happy people.
The crowd loves a record, and if they're gonna be standing out there in crazy, blistering heat on the 4th of July, I mean, if they're doing it, I may as well try and give them a record.
Maybe in America there's more of an emphasis on food than there should be. But when I look out at the audience during a competition, some people are shocked, but most people are smiling.
It's addicting, beating the heck out of people and eating hot dogs and making people smile. I do feel like garbage afterwards, but so what? Most people feel like garbage after a long day of work.
I have to learn to ignore my feelings. Not just the feeling of hunger and the feeling of full, but the feeling of embarrassment, too. I have to remember that this is only weird if I make it weird.
It wasn't like I grew up wanting to be a competitive eater at all. Not like a lot of people, like football players, famous people - they knew that that's what they wanted to do when they were young.
I know I hold the contest record for downing the most hot dogs, and the record for most Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Contest championships, but it was really cool to be a part of a Guinness World Records official attempt.
There's a couple of foods that if you see me eat them in a contest, you can tell I like them. Grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken wings, ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza. I mean, those, they go down like I was made to eat them.
There have been times when things get stuck in my throat, but you just work it up or down. Like how a swimmer probably can't imagine drowning - their bodies are so used to being in the water. I'm so used to shoving things down my throat.
There have always been a lot of critics of competitive eating. You can be a critic of anything. It's easy to be a critic. You can say negative things about golf, the amount of water wasted on golf courses. Or NASCAR. There are wastes in everything.
I can't tell you all my secrets to how I can eat so many. Someone out there might copy it. But I will tell you this: The night before the competition, I sleep only four hours. That means when I actually do eat, my stomach will want to digest the food quicker.
I was 21, and I was in college, and I'd eat real healthy during the week, and then on the weekends I would reward myself, and I'd just go to town on whatever my parents had in the fridge. And my little brother would be like, 'Hey.' And so it was actually him that begged me to do my first contest.
My birthday is always around Thanksgiving, and I always had to have turkey on my birthday. My mom was always, 'Let's celebrate your birthday on Thanksgiving.' My other siblings got to have special dinners they liked. I resented turkey. For a long time, I hated turkey. I've kind of gotten over it.
I was awful my first time. I was so shy eating in front of people. It was so awkward. But my next contest, I brought a bunch of my family out, and I won that one. I remember I almost barfed because my mom, at the end of the contest, she yelled out, 'Do it for Mama!' Everybody laughed. It was one of the closest I've ever been to barfing.
I'd never eaten lobster before. I was 21. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I was scooping guts. But I tied for third. And the two men who beat me didn't look good. One was Bob Shoudt. He seemed in pain. And I felt fine! I was 'Oh, my God, they look like they're dying. And I can eat so much more!' I knew I was made for it after that contest.