Quotes from Joey Chestnut

I can't always go out to a restaurant and have a normal dinner.

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.

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.

It's always a battle to maintain my weight.

I love Italian food, such as pasta or lasagna.

My weight does fluctuate, and there are extreme highs and lows in my blood sugar, so there is some worry about diabetes.

I think Peter King... he's kind of narrow-minded.

It's pretty rare for them to not be in our fridge, I have usually a good supply of all-beef hot dogs.

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.

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.

I usually stay away from sweets.

The weather in New York, it fluctuates so much. Some days it's humid, some days you have a thunderstorm.

You need to stay calm the day of the contest. Not let the weather bother me and just relax.

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.

The bigger the crowd, the more likely I'll do whatever it takes to win.

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.

I have to eat healthy, and I recover. I run, and I lift weights.

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.

Seafood is one of the easiest things to digest - a bratwurst is really hard on the body.

After a contest, I try to eat fairly healthy.

I know that when I'm fitter, I breathe better. If I breathe better, I can eat more.

I have the craziest dreams when I'm digesting a massive amount. It feels so real, it's psychedelic.

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.

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.