Seafood is one of the easiest things to digest - a bratwurst is really hard on the body.
Joey Chestnut
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.
You need to stay calm the day of the contest. Not let the weather bother me and just relax.
I think food brings people together, and it makes people happy.
I have the craziest dreams when I'm digesting a massive amount. It feels so real, it's psychedelic.
That's one reason I like hot dogs. Nice and clean. And you can count them as they're going down.
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.
I think my body was built to eat 68 hot dogs. It's natural.
It's pretty rare for me to be someplace that serves hot dogs and not eat one.
Every time you learn you can do something, you can go a little bit faster next time.
I've learned how to gnarl the food down. It's not pretty.
I remember as a kid watching that movie - 'Cool Hand Luke' - with my grandfather.
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.
I'm getting older, and I'm smarter about how I eat.
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.
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.
Honoring our nation's heroes and their caregivers is a cause very important to me - especially on Independence Day.
I think that happens to anybody, when they train for things over and over again, and then they just realize, 'What do I train for now?'
If I'm going to get up on stage to eat hot dogs, I'm not going to do it to get third or fourth.
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.
I have the greatest job in the world, and my life revolves around my love for food - particularly devouring hot dogs.
My weight does fluctuate, and there are extreme highs and lows in my blood sugar, so there is some worry about diabetes.
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.
Pretty much all I'm doing during an eating contest is being uncomfortable and not forgetting to breathe.
I usually stay away from sweets.
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.
I don't want to train for every contest the way I do for the Fourth of July. It would be impossible.
There's nothing pretty about competitive eating. It might be uncouth, but it is fun, and it is lighthearted.
After a contest, I try to eat fairly healthy.
Once I get a rhythm going, I can jump those hot dogs down.
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.
The weather in New York, it fluctuates so much. Some days it's humid, some days you have a thunderstorm.
I like going to the doctor, being vigilant, being told that I'm healthy so I can push myself.
I love king crab a lot. I love good Mexican food, good tacos, and chile rellenos.
I love Italian food, such as pasta or lasagna.
I'm lucky. My parents are, like, super hippies. They were just happy I was going to school and I wasn't getting in trouble.
It's pretty rare for them to not be in our fridge, I have usually a good supply of all-beef hot dogs.
Kobayashi won't talk to me. He hates me.
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.
I love to eat internationally and do eating contests everywhere. Traveling around, meeting people, and doing different things.
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.
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.
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 was able to get a civil engineering degree and travel around the world and eat.
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.
I don't really get hungry that much. Sometimes I get cravings for certain foods. But I can go all day without eating.
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.
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.
There's no better feeling than beating someone who's up on a high horse.
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.
