Food-Eating Contests

I have always thought food-eating contests are disgusting. Maybe I’m judgmental, maybe I just don’t understand why, or maybe I just think there is no way that anyone could ever be healthy when eating mass quantities of food in such a short amount of time. It seems like a recipe for disaster. However, my boyfriend always claims he loves food and talks about how much food he can eat. I tell him to stop lying because I clearly love food more than he does and can out eat him any day of the week. We decided that we needed to settle it with an eating contest. We decided to use my favorite cake in the world: a 13-pound carrot cake. This cake, which should take weeks and many people to consume, always disappears within days. It is so large and delicious that I have never had the patience to count how many layers this massive cake has. Instead, I savor each moist bite and delight in the many textures that the cake has to offer. The interplay of the overwhelmingly sugary and decadent cream cheese frosting with the actual pieces of shredded carrots, dried fruit, and other chunks in the cake makes each taste of the cake different and exciting. I actually day dream about this cake, would travel hours for a piece of this cake, and want this cake to be the cake in my wedding. This is why I was confident that I would dominate in a cake-eating contest using this cake. Although I think I ate more overall cake than he did, we decided against the contest, as we did not want to develop a taste aversion to this little piece of heaven on earth in the form of cake.

This whole ordeal made me think a lot about food-eating contests in general and made me Google food-eating contests. I began to read about all of the different competitions on the International Federation of Competitive Eating website. Then, the hall of fame caught my eye and I was looking for some reinforcement via photos that competitive eating is not healthy and results in being overweight. Then, I stumbled across Sonya Thomas (http://www.ifoce.com/rankings.php?action=detail&sn=20). Sonya Thomas is a mere 105 pounds. To name a few of her accomplishments, she has eaten 105 chicken nuggets in 5 minutes, 11 pounds of cheesecake in 9 minutes, 65 hard boiled eggs in 6 minutes and 40 seconds, and 8.4 pounds of baked beans in 2 minutes and 47 seconds. I don’t understand how she could possibly maintain such a slender body size while winning eating competition after eating competition. I do not understand physically how many of these participants in these food-eating contests are not vastly overweight. Shouldn’t there be health repercussions to eating 11 pounds of cheesecake in one sitting? Any thoughts?