cNutgroist

How unfortunate it is to fall in love with two exceptional ladies at the same time. My own dear marriage module will always be number one and still has exclusive access to the meat spatula and fun eggs but i'd be lying to myself if i didnt admit i've falled mouth over arse in love with this little lady (picture link at the bottom)...

An unrivaled hunger?

She's 5-foot-5, 99 pounds. Her appetite puts "voracious" to shame.

By Alfred Lubrano

Inquirer Staff Writer

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Growing up in South Korea without a refrigerator makes a girl famished.

And when Sonya Thomas immigrated in 1997, she brought with her that unslakable, piranha-efficient appetite.

Peering like a predator through the sneeze guard at the $6.95-a-person Win Chinese Buffet, the linguine-thin 36-year-old scoops schools of cooked and uncooked fishes onto the first of what will be six plates consumed in a two-hour lunch.

Thomas has channeled that profound and perfect hunger into her current profession: competitive eater. It's as though she took a Scarlett O'Hara-like oath - "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again" - then added, "And I will eat America in the process."

A rookie in what some call the "sport" of competitive eating, Thomas believes she will win Friday's Wing Bowl XII, the chicken-wing-eating contest run by the WIP-AM (610) morning show. She can eat 134 wings in 12 minutes, which ties her for the world record. Thomas is one of about 3,000 people who enter eating contests under the auspices of the International Federation of Competitive Eating in New York.

"Stomach-centric sport," as the federation's president Richard Shea calls it, has been around for decades. But through the influence of the seven-year-old federation, the number of contests has grown from 12 eating events in 1997 to more than 100 this year, with Wing Bowl among them.

With the federation's guidance, IFOCE-dubbed "gurgitators" have been winning cash prizes and garnering media coverage as they chew through the eating circuit, which includes jalapeño peppers in Texas, pommes frites in London, and bass in Thailand.

WIP folk invited Thomas at the same time they tried to disinvite Bill Simmons, the 318-pound Woodbury Heights trucker known as El Wingador, a four-time winner of Wing Bowl who took the event last year by devouring 154 chicken wings in 30 minutes.

So now the stage is set. There is the brooding champion who wasn't going to compete again until Wing Bowl impresario Angelo Cataldi irritated him by saying that he wins too often.

And there is Thomas, the self-confident, 5-foot-5, 99-pound challenger in a size 0 dress who drives a red Grand Am and devours spicy wings like a wolf let loose in a Tyson chicken plant.

"My personality cannot accept losing," Thomas says.

"She's a great eater for 12 minutes, but she's never proved anything for 30 minutes," El Wingador intones. "You have to have the will to go on. We'll see."

Sonya's first two plates

Thomas insists she is not bulimic.

That is the paradox. Waiflike in a pink DKNY cotton turtleneck, blue jeans, and white sneakers, Thomas looks as if she exists on sunflower seeds and Virginia air.

But appearances belie her capacities, as her 2003 eating resume shows: July 4, Brooklyn - 25 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. Sept. 13, Indianapolis - 65 hard-boiled eggs in 6 minutes, 40 seconds. Sept. 16, New York - 43 1/2 soft tacos in 11 minutes.

Today, lunch starts with a bowl of seafood soup, 16 pieces of sushi, a plate of salmon and shrimp and a 20-ounce diet soda. She eats slowly, deliberately.

This is not a training regimen. This is simply how Thomas eats. She sticks to one colossal meal a day, then works it off by walking at a 4.4-m.p.h. rate on a treadmill with a 14-degree incline for two hours a day, five days a week.

"I always ate more than regular people," she says. "At first, I was ashamed. But I'm not shy anymore. I feel like I'm special. If I were normal, my name wouldn't be in the press, right?"

Born in Kunsan, South Korea, to a carpenter and a maid, Thomas was the third of four children. Rice was scarce, and the family did what it could to satisfy Thomas's howling hunger.

She graduated from college with a degree in hotel management and came to the United States when she was 29. Thomas, who is unmarried, got a job managing a Burger King at Andrews Air Force Base in nearby Maryland. At the end of a shift, she would eat three large orders of fries, a chicken Whopper, and 20 chicken tenders, then wash it down with two 32-ounce soft drinks. Thomas recently quit the job to be a full-time eater.

"I have great stomach capacity," Thomas says. "I can take in and hold 14 pounds of food in 12 minutes."

The human stomach is roughly the size of a deflated football, says Noel Williams, director of the obesity surgery program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Competitive eaters inflate that football fast. And they can train themselves to distend their stomachs and increase capacity, says David Metz, a Penn gastroenterologist. "The stomach can relax and accommodate large meals," he explains.

Arguably the world's greatest eater, 5-foot-7, 145-pound Takeru Kobayashi of Japan shrinks his stomach by running, then expands it with cabbage and water to teach the organ to distend. Some believe that fat hinders stomach expansion, which is why thin people such as Kobayashi and Thomas excel.

Kobayashi holds the record for the granddaddy of all food competitions, the 88-year-old Nathan's hot-dog-eating contest. In 2002, he ate 50 1/2 bun-wrapped dogs in 12 minutes. It's the buns that hurt, eaters say.

Sonya's third and fourth plates

Sonya returns to the steam tables to score 20 more sushi pieces, another soup, another drink, and more cooked fish with rice. For fun, she grabs 15 wings.

Displaying her form, Thomas places a wing in her mouth with her right hand, strips the meat with her teeth, then pulls out the two bones with both hands. She chews off the remaining meat with a deft alligator chomp. The only sound is that of gnawed bone hitting plate. In the Wing Bowl, speed and efficiency count.

Unlike most eaters, Thomas does not distend her stomach in training. She is, fellow competitor Eric Booker of Long Island says, a natural, with a world-class metabolism, an ability to trick her brain into thinking her stomach isn't full when it's brimming, and a method of well-timed chewing and swallowing that allows food to clear the esophagus before she chokes.

Booker, who is 6-foot-5 and 400 pounds, is matzo-ball-eating champ (21 baseball-sized beauties in 5 minutes, 25 seconds). He has the archetypal look of an eating pro. "You would think I could eat all of Sonya's food in a competition, and eat up Sonya, too," he says. "But size doesn't matter in this sport."

Her rarity in this male-dominated activity delights Thomas.

"I call myself the Black Widow," she says with a smile accenting her high cheekbones. "Men are not always better than women. And a spider bites and kills men. That's a good name for me."

Thomas' killer charisma notwithstanding, eating contests inspire harsh criticism.

"Overconsumption of food in this country is one of our biggest problems," says sports psychologist Jerry May, an adviser to U.S. Olympic teams. "And bulimia is a big issue in sports. Binge eating isn't a sport."

Although it's not exactly a regimen for salubrious living, competitive eating may not be particularly harmful, some medical experts say.

"It's certainly not healthy," says Metz of Penn. "But I don't think it's that dangerous. I can't think of any major badness that would happen, although without experience, you could regurgitate. I just think it's crazy."

Sonya's fifth and sixth plates

Thomas digs into Oriental beef, green beans, roasted potatoes, a few more pieces of sushi, then some melon and Jell-O.

Ask eating pros why they do it and they invariably say because they can. "You gotta find your niche in life," Booker explains.

Is competitive eating interesting? Well, 20,000 people show up for Wing Bowl each year.

Is it OK to use food as sports equipment? The federation says it doesn't get many complaints.

For Sonya Thomas, competitive eating is that thing you find in life, if you're lucky, that sustains and elevates you.

"Sometimes, you feel like life is nothing, with no purpose," Thomas says. "But after eating contests, there is no stress, and no depression.

"The only bad thing is, your jaws get tired."

And here she is proving that beauty has many faces, some of them quite slobbery


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