Making Room for Whatever Is on the Table

"She's just so small. I wonder how she keeps it all down," said Kantor, an associate professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Maryland. "It wouldn't surprise me if she was bulimic. After the time limit has expired, she may just throw it all up."

Perhaps, Kantor added, Thomas's success can be explained by her having a more elastic stomach than most people and a strong sphincter between the stomach and esophagus helping to control the vomiting reflex.

Thomas insists that she keeps all of her food down and that she developed her stomach's seemingly limitless capacity primarily by drinking three 42-ounce diet colas every day during her shift as manager at the Burger King at Andrews Air Force Base. Many people think she purges, "but it's not the truth," Thomas said. "They don't understand how you can expand inside the stomach, how you can train.''

Thomas said she digests her food within eight to 12 hours after a competition and has never become sick. The only time she came close, she said, was after the cheesecake-eating competition in 2004.

"Oh, God, my stomach was upset. I couldn't think about cheesecake all day," she said.

Her strong constitution also could be the result of her avoiding the competitive eating circuit's more exotic foods, such as beef tongue, butter and mayonnaise. Her chief rival, Japanese sensation Takeru Kobayashi, has no such compunctions. Although he is most famous for downing 53 1/2 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes, Kobayashi -- the world's only eater ranked above Thomas -- is also an unparalleled gourmand of cow brains.

He once ate 57 servings in 15 minutes. Technically, however, a tendency to hurl would not change a contest's results, so long as the hurling was done in the privacy of a post-pigout bathroom. But during the contest -- that's a different story. Richard Shea, president of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, was quick to make that point at the recent buffalo wing battle.

"Anybody who suffers a reversal of fortune, also known as the Roman method, or makes me utter the term 'Elvis has left the building,' will immediately be disqualified,'' Shea warned the competitors.

Shea, who uttered humorous pronouncements during the contest with the rolling tongue of a carnival barker, is a tireless promoter of competitive eating.

He says the sport has been around in an organized fashion for about two centuries and was especially popular in the United States in the early 20th century. The annual Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest on Coney Island has been held in some form since 1916.

But when Shea and his brother, George, started the federation in the late 1990s, only a few organized events were on the calendar. The brothers attracted media attention, won corporate sponsorship and regulated contests with rules that include a minimum age of 18. In the past two years, the number of federation-sanctioned eating contests has doubled from 50 to about 100, the vast majority in the United States.

The eaters and their backers attribute the growth to modern factors including reality TV coupled with the timeless appeal of food. As the federation helpfully notes on its Web site, http://www.ifoce.com : "If you have 30 hungry Neanderthals in a cave and [a] rabbit walks in, that is a competitive eating situation.''