Champion Eaters, Food Fighters and Elite Bodybuilders: teaching the body to handle more calories without getting fat
1 March 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
There are two TV shows that can get me to stay up past 10PM. Anthony Bourdains travelogue show No Reservations based on his highly recommended book, A Cooks Tour. Think if Hunter Thompson had been a four star chef and then sent around the world to exotic locales, camera crew in tow, visiting the worlds greatest chefs and sampling the finest cuisine each culture has to offer. Part gonzo tour guide, part food porn, part adventure epic, Bourdain is an adept, funny writer and this book was easily the best I read last year on any topic or subject. His show is a sensualist festival that I cannot get enough of. I will also stay up to watch The Shield. Forest Whitaker is the greatest actor of his generation: the new Gene Hackman. As I was turning off The Shield last night I happened to catch a special on Champion Eaters guys who enter food eating contests to see how much of a particular item they can pack away in a specified timeframe. The all-time greatest champion eater, the Jim Brown/Michael Jordan/Wayne Gretsky of eaters, is a Japanese guy named Kyobayoshi. Now gluttony for the sake of gluttony is not my thing and brings to mind visions of 400-pound slobs who lift nothing heavier than a remote control and are prime candidates for heart attacks. The show I saw spotlighted three champion eaters and all three were young, lean and in shape. Which seems odd at first glance but interestingly enough I happened to catch a food eating contest on ESPN six months ago and the person who was absolutely decimated the 400-pound guys with the 70-inch waists was a 110-pound Japanese women with a 22-inch waist. She is the best female eater in the world and she cant hold a candle to the great Kyobayoshi. In Japan food eating contests are called Food Fights and serious money can be made working the Japanese Food Fight circuit. They televise competitions and the top athletes have rock star cult status in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Kyobayoshi is approximately 5-9 and weighs about 180-pounds. He is ripped, shredded, cut and defined he has a crisp set of six-pack abdominals and carries a guesstimated 8% body fat level. He also is a powerlifter of sorts and was shown in the gym weight training. He likes to move tremendous poundage for moderate reps, hoisting the weight a few inches: we call this type of lifting partial rep training. They showed him squatting 600, deadlifting 600 and bench pressing 400, moving the barbell a few scant inches on each rep. The scene then shifted to a local restaurant and showed him in training for the famous Nathans hot dog eating competition held every July 4th on Coney Island. Kyobayoshi holds the current world hot dog eating record, consuming 54 dogs and buns in twelve minutes, twenty more than his nearest competitor. Back at the restaurant The Tsunami (his competitive title) proceeds to methodically consume three giant bowls of noodles and beef then eat a mountainous desert. The owner comes out, shakes his head and says, He just ate 22-pounds of food. He did likewise at another commercial eating establishment, consuming 100 plates of food. The other two competitive eaters featured, both Americans, one a local level guy and the other an international level eater, were both slim and athletic looking. Why is this interesting? Kyobayoshi was quite lucid and scientific about his training approach: I normally eat six times a day and have taught my body how to handle huge amounts of food without getting fat.
He and the other Food Fighters have developed a system based around multiple meals staged at equidistant intervals throughout the day: every three hours they eat and this causes the metabolism, the human blast furnace, to fire up in order to digest and distribute the food/fuel. Over time they are able to eat more at each feeding and through the process of gradual acclimatizing the system to ever more calories, more food can be consumed without adding to fat storage depots. This Food Fighter approach reminded me of my days at Weider when I was routinely sent on assignment to cover the Arnold Classic and the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding championships. I would interview, hob knob and eat with the huge bodybuilders who routinely consumed 7,000 to 10,000 calories a day while maintaining 5-8% body fat percentiles. They had recalibrated the human metabolism to systematically consume more and more food. The method to their madness was the tremendous number of calories, combined with hardcore weight training and aerobics, allowed them to build gigantic muscles without becoming fat. So what? What relevancy does this have to the regular person intent on triggering a physical transformation? What the food fighters and the elite bodybuilders have discovered is by establishing a multiple meal eating schedule the human metabolism can be reprogrammed to eat more and actually become leaner in the process. This is counterintuitive and seemingly defies logic and science but their reality is staring us in the face.
The food fighters are totally indiscriminate about the source of the calories; the bodybuilders consume only lean protein and natural carbs and are extremely discriminating in their choice of food. Both groups eat more in a single day than an obese person with a shut down metabolism does in an entire week. The lesson to be learned is profound and profoundly simple: far better to ingest the days calories in six meals than three meals and ten times better to ingest the days calories in six meals than ONE meal as so many people do, living on virtually nothing during the day and loading up at night. The Food Fighters have shown that even eating indiscriminately you can become thinner by eating those indiscriminate calories in multiple feedings. The bodybuilders have taken it one step further and cleaned up the food selections thereby obtaining even more incredible results. Lets first establish the multiple meal daily eating schedule and stick to it: after youve locked it in and tightened down the regimentation, turn your attention towards cleaning up the food selections. You can eat more and lose fat but you have to be regimented and consistent.
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