Adventures in Competitive Eating–The Ultimate Pigout

One thing I often get called out on is my support of whole foods and condemnation of ultra-processed ones. Our prevailing “calorie-centric” paradigm champions that all that matters is the calorie content of your food: eat more and you’ll just end up getting fatter. It should be just as easy to overeat on real food as it is on junk food, right?

I’ve bashed the practicality of caloric restriction numerous times before, and showed you that not all foods fill you up the same on a calorie-for-calorie basis, but I figured I’d try a couple of extreme experiments to test this out myself and let you in on the results.

Here’s my mission: eat as much “good” food in a day as possible, then eat as much “junk” food in a day as possible, and see how many calories of each I consume.

Well, I carried out both of these tests, and found some interesting results. First and foremost of these is NEVER DO THIS YOURSELF! Laugh at my pain from a safe distance, trust me.

The Rules of the Game

So based on my own experiences, understanding of ancestral human diets, and studies such as the one that gave us the satiety index, I’ve come to believe that the cause for the obesity epidemic is less the high calorie count of the foods we eat, but rather the metabolic havoc they play with your body.

And what better way to test it than by seeing how it works on me?

So here’s the plan for phase one, to be completed in one day:

• Don’t eat anything all morning.
• At noon, eat as much pot roast as I can possibly handle.
• Do 12 minutes of kettlebell swing intervals at 6 pm.
• At 8, eat as much pot roast as I can.
• Only add up my calories after I’m done for the day.

I then rested a few days, eating as normal, before moving to phase two, where I basically swapped pot roast for soda, pizza, burgers, fries, shakes, and candy.

Phase One: The All-You-Can-Eat Pot Roast Challenge

The pot roast part of the experiment was more challenging (from a logistical standpoint) than the junk food phase for one big reason: whole foods rarely have listed calorie counts. I could get good estimates off of sites like FitDay, but I’d have to do some serious guesswork if I only ate a partial roast.

My plan to get around this was to cut my usual roast down to a size that I expected I could down over the course of a day, and eat scrambled eggs to finish if I was still hungry. This way, I could sorta-easily add up the calorie counts of the foods I used in the roast (2.76 lb chuck roast, 1/2 lb carrots, 2 lb potatoes, etc.) and scrambled eggs for a reasonable estimation of my intake.

I ran into my first roadbump at lunch. Since this was a workday, I just hauled a big bowl of pot roast with me that day, hoping it would suffice. That’s when I learned how much more difficult it is to eat until you can eat no more rather than eating until satiated.

For me, there is usually a window of fewer than ten bites of food where I go from “still hungry” to “full” to “unbearably stuffed.” I’ve rarely gone past this point because the discomfort of eating more far outweighs the pleasure of the taste and loss of appetite I experience.

Chowing down on my massive lunch, I surpassed all these milestones, but like a climber making the last push to the top of Everest, I soldiered onwards, not realizing that the peak was much further away that it appeared.

I figured that once I got into the realm of “unbearably stuffed,” I would soon hit a wall, become ill, or experience severe pain that would draw a clear line where the finish line was. I was mistaken. I kept eating and eating and eating, but I stayed pretty constant with discomfort, taking a break or two, but never throwing in the towel.

…but then my bowl was empty. A failure of sorts, since I hypothetically could have fit more in my belly. Oh well, perhaps I’d just have more of an appetite for dinner?

Although I was far from starving come 8 pm, I still had enough of an appetite to gladly reheat the remainder of the pot roast and go to town. And did I ever.

After about an hour and a half of nonstop eating, I finally hit the wall. I didn’t feel sick or in pain at all, I just couldn’t keep any more of my meal down–exactly the goal I had set out to achieve in the first place. Unfortunately, this happened before I finished the roast, so I wasn’t going to be able to get a really accurate count of the calories I consumed. Strike two against my self-experiment, I suppose. Oh well, I’ll just use a window of 90% to 100% of my calculated calories of the entire roast, and estimate that I ended up at somewhere between: (drum roll, please…)

5,137-5,708 kcal!

Phase Two: The All-You-Can-Eat Junk Food Challenge

So I hit a couple of snafus during the first phase of this experiment, but I knew I’d be in good shape for the second: gorging on sugary, floury foods. But man was I unprepared for how it turned out.

Just like phase one several days earlier, this day was a work day. I woke up (without an alarm) from a solid night’s sleep, feeling refreshed and energetic. I worked all morning with my usual high levels of energy and attention, and went out to In-N-Out for a lunch of a Double-Double (Animal Style), fries, and a chocolate shake. This is a typical cheat meal of mine, and I knew that it generally gets me really full, but I knew I had to take it to the next level, so I finished it all up with a half liter of soda and a large package of candy.

It was during my drive back to work that I knew I was in trouble.

I started getting an upset stomach and lost all my focus and energy. I spent the rest of the day the way I did back when I was getting 4-6 hours of sleep per night: in an unproductive stupor, oscillating between running around like a decapitated chicken and slumping in front of my computer. I was in rough shape.

The workout sucked, and I dreaded the full pizza, large bag of potato chips, soda, and candy that were awaiting me at 8. But I pushed forward, going to work on that pile of food. I ate, and ate, and ate. An hour had passed, and I still didn’t feel anywhere near close to the finish line I reached a few days earlier with my pot roast. I could just keep eating and eating and feel little of the satiation I felt then.

But that wasn’t the main problem. I seriously thought I was going to end up in the hospital that night. The stomachache went from dull to overwhelming, not in an “I’m stuffed” way, but in an “I’m getting really sick” way. I started getting a dull headache and pain in my eye sockets, and my forearms and calves started aching. Weirdest of all, I started getting really anxious. I rarely have weird emotional issues, and when I do I can usually pinpoint something obvious in my life that is causing it.

I eventually threw in the towel once I realized that every bite was causing my pain to rise exponentially. In no way did I feel satisfied–as I did gorging on pot roast–at any point during the meal. Just a seemingly neverending session of eating purely for entertainment that was eventually overwhelmed by the acute illness it led to. But I was able to calculate my intake that day at…

4,895 kcal!

Lessons Learned

So that’s it! I was wrong all along!

In this challenge to see what is the most difficult type of food to overeat, junk food came out as the clear victor! Looks like I might need to close up shop here at the blog and start a new one, praising pizza over steak and potatoes for its proven record at keeping them calories down…

Or I could go the other way and try to spin this in a way that makes real food look better. (Hey, I’m not even taking into account the 15%-20% markdown that food companies do on their calorie counts!)

But instead I’ll be more realistic about these results. I’m tempted to write off the entire challenge as not giving me what I was looking for–hard, realistic numbers on the upper limit of intake of different types of foods. I hit many snags along the way, but I did learn a lot of valuable things I’d like to share with you:

1. It’s more difficult to get “stuffed” than it is to get “full.” Here’s the deathblow to this experiment. I anticipated that setting “being stuffed” as the finish line for both of these phases would be as easy as “being full” works for me to know when to stop eating all my meals normally. I can understand how things that take your attention away from your experience of eating (TV, computer, etc.) might lead to overeating.
   
2. Overeating meat and vegetables gives me energy, focus, and satiety. For the past couple of years, I have been eating pretty epic meals–heaping piles of meat and vegetables. Most people are pretty astounded when they see this, but I’m very happy with where I am health- and fitness-wise, and see no reason to change. Taking this to absurd extremes didn’t take too much of a toll on me. I felt more energetic and probably burned off a lot more than usual that day spontaneously.
   
3. Overeating junk food makes me lethargic, anxious, and sick. My original plan for phase two was to consume only soda (I believe that liquid sugar is perhaps the unhealthiest thing you can put in your body), but thankfully I dialed it back. I was worried that the amount of sugar and caffeine I’d be drowning my body would put me in the hospital. The horrible sickness I actually felt reminded me almost excactly of how I feel when I am sleep deprived. The only thing really missing was the sweats. I might not have been able to eat as much junk food, but I can’t imagine the metabolic damage that one day did to my body (to say nothing of the loss of productivity I experienced.)

Which leads to the biggest lesson of all here…

Never, Ever, Try This At Home!

Seriously, this was a friggin’ nightmare.

While phase one went just fine, the second part made me feel worse than I ever have in years. If that’s not enough, this test pretty much proves it’s own fallibility, with the vague point of being completely stuffed either being more arbitrary than I’d like or having it nowhere in sight before an imminent physical, emotional, and mental collapse.

I’m going to try a more “realistic” form of this experiment–one that actually reflects the way that most (non-insane bloggers) eat. In the meantime, I suggest you leave the competitive eating to the pros, such as Gal Sone, a Japanese woman who puts the rest of us mere mortals to shame with her seemingly endless ability to eat, and who doesn’t even weigh 100 lbs. (Explain that one with conventional wisdom!)

So my little “amateur hour” here is now over (phew!). Here is Ms. Sone putting down 40,000 kcal in one day. (No knowledge of the Japanese language necessary to admire this impressive feat.)

Tagged as: all-you-can-eat, competitive eating, junk food, real food, self-experiments