“Seafood is one of the easiest things to digest – a bratwurst is really hard on the body.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I have the craziest dreams when I’m digesting a massive amount. It feels so real, it’s psychedelic.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I like going to the doctor, being vigilant, being told that I’m healthy so I can push myself.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Honoring our nation’s heroes and their caregivers is a cause very important to me – especially on Independence Day.”
― Joey Chestnut
“It’s pretty rare for them to not be in our fridge, I have usually a good supply of all-beef hot dogs.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I love food, and not surprisingly, I often suffer from stomach upsets when I overeat in general, let alone when I’m competing.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I think my body was built to eat 68 hot dogs. It’s natural.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’d like to go out on top, preferably breaking a new world record on the Fourth of July.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I think food brings people together, and it makes people happy.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I was 21, and I was in college, and I’d eat real healthy during the week, and then on the weekends I would reward myself, and I’d just go to town on whatever my parents had in the fridge. And my little brother would be like, ‘Hey.’ And so it was actually him that begged me to do my first contest.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’ve signed babies’ arms. I wanted to pull a ‘Ricky Bobby’ and sign a baby’s forehead.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Everything at a baseball game is pretty much health food if you subscribe to the theory that you’re eating what makes you happy.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I have the greatest job in the world, and my life revolves around my love for food – particularly devouring hot dogs.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I didn’t just eat hot dogs. I studied how the food went into your system and how it would be digested.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I know I hold the contest record for downing the most hot dogs, and the record for most Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Contest championships, but it was really cool to be a part of a Guinness World Records official attempt.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I was able to get a civil engineering degree and travel around the world and eat.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I don’t really get hungry that much. Sometimes I get cravings for certain foods. But I can go all day without eating.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“There’s nothing pretty about competitive eating. It might be uncouth, but it is fun, and it is lighthearted.”
― Joey Chestnut
“There’s no better feeling than beating someone who’s up on a high horse.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I can’t always go out to a restaurant and have a normal dinner.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I lose now and then. I get lazy. And sometimes I work just hard enough to win.”
― Joey Chestnut
“The bigger the crowd, the more likely I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’m really normal except for the competitive eating.”
― Joey Chestnut
“When I’m eating I try to make sure I can breathe through my nose the entire time. If I have to breathe through my mouth, there’s no way I’m eating or swallowing.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I love king crab a lot. I love good Mexican food, good tacos, and chile rellenos.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I think Peter King… he’s kind of narrow-minded.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I love to eat internationally and do eating contests everywhere. Traveling around, meeting people, and doing different things.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I think the traveling is what drew me into ‘The Amazing Race’ years ago.”
― Joey Chestnut
“It wasn’t like I grew up wanting to be a competitive eater at all. Not like a lot of people, like football players, famous people – they knew that that’s what they wanted to do when they were young.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Every time you learn you can do something, you can go a little bit faster next time.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’m very competitive.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’ve learned how to gnarl the food down. It’s not pretty.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I love Italian food, such as pasta or lasagna.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Going into a contest, I do not eat solid food and take in minimal calories for days, so I am hungry.”
― Joey Chestnut
“After a contest, I try to eat fairly healthy.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I love to eat! I don’t think I have ever gotten sick of eating a food, unless it is bad food.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“My weight does fluctuate, and there are extreme highs and lows in my blood sugar, so there is some worry about diabetes.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’ve strained some muscles here and there, in my throat, even my jaw. Nothing that doesn’t heal quickly.”
― Joey Chestnut
“It’s always a battle to maintain my weight.”
― Joey Chestnut
“There are competitive people who love to push their body but don’t love to eat like I do.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Make sure I’m chewing, swallowing, and breathing, my whole body is working together. I can just find a rhythm and keep going and going and going. It’s my love of food.”
― Joey Chestnut
“So now I’m ‘the hot dog guy,’ which isn’t bad. I take it in stride. It’s not like it was my goal in life. I’m having fun with it.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“If I can train for a contest for a week, it’s a guaranteed victory.”
― Joey Chestnut
“When I’m in training, I eat no solid food except hot dogs for six weeks.”
― Joey Chestnut
“It’s more of a mental sport because I know I can push harder than someone who doesn’t know what his body can do.”
― Joey Chestnut
“The weather in New York, it fluctuates so much. Some days it’s humid, some days you have a thunderstorm.”
― Joey Chestnut
“The way I see it, I love to eat more than anybody.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I go to the doctor every four months to get my blood work done to make sure everything is working right.”
― Joey Chestnut
“It’s pretty rare for me to be someplace that serves hot dogs and not eat one.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Kobayashi was the man. The other competitive eaters, they thought of him as unbeatable… He wasn’t an eater. He was a god.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I think I get out of bed because I love to eat.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Competitive eating is something I can control. I know I can control, and if I push hard, I can win.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Winning tastes pretty good.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’m getting paid to eat. It’s not too bad of a life.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I remember as a kid watching that movie – ‘Cool Hand Luke’ – with my grandfather.”
― Joey Chestnut
“There’s nothing worse than getting third.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Military caregivers play an essential role in the recovery process of our veterans and are more than deserving of our support.”
― Joey Chestnut
“You need to stay calm the day of the contest. Not let the weather bother me and just relax.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I know that when I’m fitter, I breathe better. If I breathe better, I can eat more.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’m getting older, and I’m smarter about how I eat.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Traveling around the world to eat, it’s a weird life, but I love it.”
― 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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“The most important thing in any contest is finding your rhythm and making your body work for you.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I usually stay away from sweets.”
― Joey Chestnut
“That’s one reason I like hot dogs. Nice and clean. And you can count them as they’re going down.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I love hot dogs.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Once I get a rhythm going, I can jump those hot dogs down.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Pretty much all I’m doing during an eating contest is being uncomfortable and not forgetting to breathe.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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?’”
― Joey Chestnut
“I don’t mind losing because it really shows me what the other eaters are capable of.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I don’t want to train for every contest the way I do for the Fourth of July. It would be impossible.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
“It doesn’t get old. Just like running doesn’t get old to people who like to run. I just love to eat.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I have to eat healthy, and I recover. I run, and I lift weights.”
― Joey Chestnut
“If there’s something I like, I’m going to eat a little more of it than most people.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I do know when my body is ready or when it’s going to perform best for me.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I can’t tell you all my secrets to how I can eat so many. Someone out there might copy it. But I will tell you this: The night before the competition, I sleep only four hours. That means when I actually do eat, my stomach will want to digest the food quicker.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’ve slowly made my body adapt and understand what’s going to happen.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Honestly, I’m so competitive that sometimes I don’t understand what other people are going through.”
― Joey Chestnut
“There have always been a lot of critics of competitive eating. You can be a critic of anything. It’s easy to be a critic. You can say negative things about golf, the amount of water wasted on golf courses. Or NASCAR. There are wastes in everything.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’d never eaten lobster before. I was 21. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I was scooping guts. But I tied for third. And the two men who beat me didn’t look good. One was Bob Shoudt. He seemed in pain. And I felt fine! I was ‘Oh, my God, they look like they’re dying. And I can eat so much more!’ I knew I was made for it after that contest.”
― Joey Chestnut
“Kobayashi won’t talk to me. He hates me.”
― Joey Chestnut
“I’m more than just a competitive eater. I’m a smart guy. I could be an awesome park ranger.”
― Joey Chestnut
“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.”
― Joey Chestnut
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