Inside the disturbing dangers of competitive eating

About a week after eating 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes to win the Nathan's Famous hot-dog-eating contest, Matt Stonie drove to a Hooters and bought some chicken wings — 200 of them. By dinnertime, he'd polished them off as part of his training regimen for the Hooters Worldwide Wing Eating Championship to be held Saturday in Clearwater, Fla.

"It's hard work," he said. "We push through the pain."

These so-called training sessions can include drinking more than a gallon of water and are used by competitors to stretch their stomachs so they can hold more food for contests. But they can lead to serious injuries and are part of what competitive eater Patrick Bertoletti calls the dark side of the sport.

Stonie calls it essential.

Starting about a month and a half before he beat eight-time defending champion Joey Chestnut at the Nathan's Famous contest on the Fourth of July, Stonie said, he ate as many as 60 hot dogs three times a week and followed some of those practice sessions by drinking almost a gallon of water.

"Drinking as much water as I can afterwards till, bluntly put, I feel like I'm going to explode," said Stonie, who won $10,000 for his victory and positioned himself for lucrative appearance fees. "It's pushing your limits."

Stonie, 23, has been pushing his limits at the table for several years. Although 5-8 and 125 pounds, he gained a following on YouTube — more than 600,000 subscribers strong now — by completing stunts such as drinking a gallon of Gatorade in 37 seconds and eating 6 pounds of pickled jalapenos.

Now the stakes are higher, with first prize in the Hooters contest paying $8,500. Stonie said last week that he planned to eat 200 wings four to five times before the contest, which Chestnut won last year by eating 182 wings in 10 minutes.

"A lot of us don't know what we're doing," Stonie said of competitive eating tactics. "We're just experimenting. Sometimes people go a little gung-ho, a little overboard, and hurt themselves."

Bertoletti, a longtime competitive eater who this year was awarded $10,000 and a Harley-Davidson when he won SportsRadio 94WIP's Wing Bowl in Philadelphia, said he was among those who had been injured while training. He declined to discuss the injury in detail.

"I don't want to hurt the sport, I don't want to hurt my marketability and I'm embarrassed," Bertoletti said.

Despite the risk, Bertoletti said, he has continued to use the dangerous training methods because they help expand his stomach capacity and enhance his performance — from 37 hot dogs and buns during the 2010 Nathan's Famous contest to 53 the next year.

George Shea, who along with his brother runs the Nathan's contest and started Major League Eating, a national circuit that includes the Hooters contest, said he and his brother discouraged eaters from training.

"It's ridiculous," Shea said of the training. "You don't need to do it. ... There's no arms race to 100 (hot dogs)."

But among those who have acknowledged training are Chesnut, who holds the record of 69 hot dogs and buns consumed during the 2013 Nathan's contest.

Dave Brunelli, a former professional boxer who began competitive eating a few years ago, said he no longer consumed more than a gallon of water during training sessions because more than that left him feeling dizzy for weeks on end.

Competitive eaters face other risks, according to medical experts.

The training and competitions not only can cause gastric ruptures and drop sodium levels to dangerously low levels that might lead to seizures but also can trigger eating disorders, said Kim Dennis, an eating disorder expert from Chicago.

"Putting all of the health risks aside, there are certainly some psychological or psychiatric risks with regards to development of an eating disorder for people who had any sort of genetic predisposition to have one," said Dennis, a board-certified psychiatrist. "Somebody eating 70 hot dogs in 10 minutes is self-abuse to some extent."

A 2007 study entitled "Competitive Speed Eating: Truth and Consequences" and published in the American Journal of Roentgenology concluded: "We speculate that professional speed eaters eventually may develop morbid obesity, profound gastroparesis, intractable nausea and vomiting and even the need for a gastrectomy. Despite its growing popularity, competitive speed eating is a potentially self-destructive form of behavior."

But the behavior can pay off for the top competitors. Stonie said that he made about $100,000 while competing in 17 events in 2014. This year he plans to make considerably more after his victory in the Nathan's contest against Chesnut, who made $230,000 last year, according to Shea.

No one has benefited more from competitive eating than Nathan's Famous. Its annual contest attracts about 40,000 people a year to watch in person outside the company's flagship restaurant on Coney Island in New York.

Between 2003, the year before ESPN first broadcast the contest, and 2014, the company's hot dog sales skyrocketed from fewer than 250 million to 1 billion.

Eric Smallwood, managing partner at Apex Marketing Group Inc. in suburban Detroit, said the contest had had an unmistakable impact on Nathan's.

He also noted the company's stock climbed to $53 a share in 2014 from $6 a share in 2004, the year ESPN first telecast the event, although the price per share has settled at about $32 while the contest continues to grow in popularity.

Meanwhile, Stonie's stock is rising. He said a company called him about making his own trading card. And Major League Eating is flying him from his home in San Jose to Clearwater for the Hooters contest a day early to help publicize the event.

By then Stonie's training will be complete. And he all but shrugged off consuming 4 to 5 pounds of chicken meat during the practice sessions designed to help him knock off Chesnut and the rest of the field.

"It's nothing compared to stuff I do for other contests," he said. "But it's still a good amount of food."

Of the training, Stonie added: "You wake up the next day, and you're bloated. It's not fun. It's work."

PHOTOS: 2015 Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest