Bulimic models and professional eaters are career bingers. They challenge the body’s limits on a regular basis. Here is my question: Is the ability to eat to extremes a matter of practice, or are some stomachs—and I’m not saying anything here about my husband Ed—naturally more compliant?
In 2006, medical science took a look. David Metz observed the stomachs of a competitive eater—Tim Janus, then ranked number 3 on the circuit, under the name Eater X—and a six-foot-two, 210-pound control subject, while the men spent twelve minutes eating as many hotdogs as they could. A side of high-density barium enabled Metz to follow the wieners’ progress via fluoroscope. Metz had a theory I hadn’t considered: that prodigious eaters were people with faster-than-normal gastric emptying times. In other words, their stomachs might be making more room by quickly dumping food out the back door into the small intestine. The opposite turned out to be true. After two hours, Eater X’s stomach had emptied only a fourth of what he’d eaten, whereas the control eater’s stomach, more in keeping with a typical stomach, had cleared out three-fourths.
Somewhere into the seventh dog, the control eater reported to Metz that he would be sick if he ate another bite. His stomach, on the fluoroscope, was barely distended beyond its starting size. Eater X, by contrast, effortlessly consumed thirty-six hotdogs, taking them down in pairs. His stomach, on the fluoroscope, became “a massively distended, food-filled sac occupying most of the upper abdomen.” He claimed to feel no pain or nausea. He didn’t even feel full.
But the question remains: Are prodigious eaters born with a naturally compliant stomach, or do they alter the organ over years of incremental stretching—the digestive version of the tribal lip plate? Is the lack of discomfort there from the start, or does it come from habitually overriding the brain’s signals? The implication, for the rest of us, being that the more you overeat, the more you overeat.
By happenstance, a friend of mine is acquainted with Erik Denmark—aka Erik the Red, ranked number 7 nationally—and offered to put us in touch. (The two had met on the set of dLifeTV, a show about living with diabetes. That a diabetic man holds the record for fry-bread consumption is yet one more mystery of professional eating.) I asked Denmark, Is the successful glutton born or built? Both, it seems. Denmark recalled visits to McDonald’s as a child, where he would finish, by himself, the twenty-piece family box of Chicken McNuggets. But Metz had the impression, based on conversations with Eater X, that nature trumped nurture. “It’s a structural thing,” he told me. “At rest their stomachs are not much bigger, but their ability to receptively relax is unbelievable. The stomach just expands and expands and expands.”
Though Denmark agrees with Metz that genes matter—as he puts it, “very few people could eat sixty hotdogs no matter how hard they worked at it”—he considers the inherently stretchy stomach merely the foundation, the starting point, for a career that requires daily practice and training. “I think,” he told me, “that it has more to do with how much you’re willing to push your body past the point that you would ever want to go.” Despite his natural assets, Erik the Red did not hit the ground running. At his first competition, he put away just under three pounds to the winner’s six pounds. (In relating the story, Denmark does not bother to mention what the food had been. It doesn’t seem to matter. Flavor fatigue sets in after three to five minutes; beyond that point everything is more or less equally revolting.)*
I asked Denmark why the body’s safety mechanisms, specifically regurgitation, don’t kick in. In fact, they do. “This is going to sound gross,” he said, “but you just, you know, like, swallow it down and keep eating.” Major-league eating judges define regurgitation as the point at which food comes out, not up. “It’s like a speed bump that you just go over. It’s mental.” Yes.
All competitive eaters follow a conditioning regimen. The cheapest and least fattening training material is water. Denmark can water-load about two gallons at a sitting. When he began his career, he could barely get through one. As a point of reference—and warning—recall that one gallon was the point at which Key-?berg’s cadavers’ stomachs began to rupture. Part of this training is psychological. In addition to stretching the stomach, water-loading gets the competitor accustomed to the feeling of being grotesquely full.