I’m not a fan of the show nor of eating for sport. I can’t imagine anything that would turn me off food more than doing so to beat some sort of record for size or spicy heat or what have you.
Having said that, I can’t help but like the show’s host, Adam Richman. On occassion I’ll flick by the channel and pause to watch in disgust and perverse curiousity as he shovels down some absurb amount of food of one type or another. Recently he attempted to eat a 7lb breakfast burrito.
Even when I do pause long enough to watch, I find myself actually concerned for the man’s health and well being. Like I said, he seems a likeable sort and I don’t want to see him kill himself with these ridiculous challenges.
Now I’ve seen him more recently on TV and he looks like he’s lost some weight and he’s looking much better/healthier. So perhaps he’s put a stop to the binge eating and I wish him well.
But back to the OP… how much have you eaten in any one single meal and can it be measured in pounds?
Twice in the span of a few months (months? Heck, it was a few WEEKS!) several years ago I overdid it : A) at a Christmas party that my wife’s employer put on and then B) at the dinner I took her to for her birthday. I didn’t get sick but I remember thinking that I’d eaten WAAAAAY too much food at one time, in both cases. I haven’t done anything like that since. It was stupid of me to do that (and more than once, no less) but at least I learned my lesson on that faster than I did when it came to overdoing it with alcohol!
The most was at a Lone Star Steakhouse my husband took me to - I had the 20 oz. porterhouse (I finished it), a baked potato with sour cream and cheddar and butter, and a dinner salad. Plus we ordered an appetizer (the onion thingy) and we had dessert. And a few cocktails.
I had a cheap meal plan for my freshman year in college, which meant I could afford to go to the cafeteria about once per day. This meant that I usually only ate once per day. The cafeteria was all-you-can eat, so I ate a day’s worth of food in one sitting. And mind you, this was a day’s worth of food for a 200 lb 18 year old.
A typical meal might have been something like this: one plate of salad with dressing, a serving of buttered noodles, one roast beef and swiss sub, one plate of various vegetables, four patties of mystery meat with gravy, a grapefruit, two oranges, two bananas, one bowl of ice cream, and one slice of cake or pie.
While I was in the Navy and at sea (on a submarine), I was often so busy/tired I would sleep through mealtimes. Which meant I was very hungry when I was awake. The cooks saw this as a challenge – one steak night (usually once a week) I ate two steaks and veggies and asked for more. They gave me a dinner plate piled high with a mountain of corn. I ate that, and asked for steak. They gave me three steaks. I ate those three steaks, and asked for more. They said they were out of food, and I went to bed.
The only time I thought I was going to throw up (didn’t) from sheer volume of food was at a Lambert’s Cafe.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a “family style” restaurant. Basically everyone orders their own entree (like a 3 lb. pork steak, or two whole chickens), then you get a few 5-gallon buckets of sides at the table to share. To add to the misery, servers walk around the place towing more 50-gallon drums of sides that you can get a scoop of whenever you want.
But WAIT! All-you-can-eat warm rolls that they’ll throw to you from across the dining room.
I’ve done 4 lbs. of food on very rare occasions and it usually ends with me swearing I’ll never do it again.
I do 3 lbs. a few times a year but it takes effort near the end and I have to be really hungry.
I can do two lbs. no problem.
1lbs. or 1 1/2 lbs. is a typical dinner when you take into account meat, veg, starch, etc.
The most I ever ate is that time I ate 40 McNuggets, a Double Quarter Pounder with cheese, a super-size fries, two double cheeseburgers, and a Big Mac. Oh, and a super-size Coke with a couple of refills.
I didn’t eat at McDonald’s for probably 5 years after that.
A friend and I went to a steakhouse a long time ago and we each ordered two 16-ounce prime ribs. Each prime rib came with 2 sides so we got 8 sides total (mashed potatoes, french fries, green beans, I don’t remember what else). We finished everything. I don’t remember why we thought this was a good idea.
When I first moved to Chicago, I was hungry one night so I ordered me up one of those famous Chicago-style pies. I can usually eat 5 pieces of pizza when I’m really, really hungry, so I was about half-way through my fourth Chicago-style slice before I realized I was in big trouble. Big, big trouble.
I can consume literally three quarts of my homemade gazpacho at a single (kind of extended) sitting. Fortunately, since it’s mostly just chopped raw veggies and tomato puree and water, even that amount of overindulgence comes to less than 400 calories. But I definitely feel like my insides are sloshing around in a vat of gazpacho for a while afterwards.
(So worth it, though; I make really killer gazpacho, if I say so myself. Mmmm, now I want some gazpacho.)
I went to a steak house in Wyoming and ate a 64 oz steak plus sides but at that time I was playing college football and I could eat 2 Chipotle burritos as a normal meal and three wasn’t much of a stretch. I still commonly get 24 oz rib eyes from my butcher and chase it with a baked potato.
I’ve done several eating challenges over the years and the only one that beat me was a 12 egg omelet with a pound of potatoes and a pound of sausage. It wasn’t the volume that beat me it was the pool of grease and after I ate half I just didn’t want more.
I’ve never even heard of this show, let alone seen it.
When I was much, much younger I could eat a giant meal and several desserts, or a large pizza, but probably not more than two pounds at one sitting. If that. Now at 56, no way I can, or want, to do that.
I have noticed that most contestants on eating competitions are quite thin.
I’m sure I could still eat a large pizza without too much trouble. I’ve polished off an entire 1/2 gallon of ice cream more than once, but that comes with fairly serious side effects.
I think the most I ever ate was the first time I went to a ‘fancy’ Vegas buffet (The Bellagio, probably 7 or 8 years ago?) and was challenged to eat at least one of every dessert available. After having a full buffet meal. On the one hand, the portions are usually fairly small… on the other hand, there are a lot of options
I’m a slacker. Probably the most was a large pizza and a pitcher of beer, which really didn’t seem like all that much at the time. Or maybe the half dozen homemade tacos (6" or 8" torts, not those lame-o things you get at a fast food joint). Can’t do that sort of thing anymore, so the most now would be seconds on the turkey dinner.
A fancy hotel buffet in Chengdu, China. After two years of pretty much only Chinese food, my friends and I dropped the $20.00 for the most amazing buffet imaginable-- custom order sushi, a room full on Indian food, cooked on demand middle dishes, hundreds of desserts…and cheese! All you could eat cheeses from across Europe.
I’ve seen it a few times. I don’t watch it anymore. Basically the guy takes on food challenges from different eateries around the country. Usually they come in one of two forms: either in terms of quantity or in terms of spiciness. He dutifully won every challenge that I saw him take on until he got to…Seattle (of all places)! Where something like a 12- (or 20- or 120-, I forget the exact number) omelet, of all things, did him in. After seeing him finish off what seemed like whole sides of cows or whole beds of oysters or entire drums of ice cream or meals that (reportedly) had spiciness ratings of 12 stars (on a scale of 1 - 10), to see him put up his white flag over an OMELET was something that I simply would never have guessed could happen. But it did. Score one for The Emerald City!!
