Quotes from Joey Chestnut

I've slowly made my body adapt and understand what's going to happen.

I'm getting older, and I'm smarter about how I eat.

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.

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.

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.

I don't want to train for every contest the way I do for the Fourth of July. It would be impossible.

Once I get a rhythm going, I can jump those hot dogs down.

The most important thing in any contest is finding your rhythm and making your body work for you.

When I'm in training, I eat no solid food except hot dogs for six weeks.

Going into a contest, I do not eat solid food and take in minimal calories for days, so I am hungry.

It's pretty rare for me to be someplace that serves hot dogs and not eat one.

I love king crab a lot. I love good Mexican food, good tacos, and chile rellenos.

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.

Kobayashi was the man. The other competitive eaters, they thought of him as unbeatable... He wasn't an eater. He was a god.

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.

Honoring our nation's heroes and their caregivers is a cause very important to me - especially on Independence Day.

I think my body was built to eat 68 hot dogs. It's natural.

Pretty much all I'm doing during an eating contest is being uncomfortable and not forgetting to breathe.

There's nothing pretty about competitive eating. It might be uncouth, but it is fun, and it is lighthearted.

Every time you learn you can do something, you can go a little bit faster next time.

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.

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.

I lose now and then. I get lazy. And sometimes I work just hard enough to win.

I love food, and not surprisingly, I often suffer from stomach upsets when I overeat in general, let alone when I'm competing.