‘My dream is to nail 40 hotdogs’ – The disgusting world of competitive eating 

Max Stanford eats the same unappealing meal every day.

He microwaves a huge bowl of frozen vegetables, mixes them up with gravy until they turn soupy and then envelops them in wraps using three heads of lettuce. 

You’d think the 2.5 kilo salad soup would fill him up, but no. He supplements the strange dish with chips and dips, then bowl upon bowl of greek yoghurt and breakfast cereal, before washing it down with a kilo of protein shake. For pudding it’s ice cream – or more bowls of cereal. 

The meal – the only one he eats in a day – is designed to fully nourish him while stretching his stomach in readiness to become one of the world’s greatest eaters. 

Max, from Brixton, doesn’t look like a professional glutton. At 6’2 and 74 kg, his slender frame belies the fact that he can nail 50 Cadbury creme eggs in one sitting.

A Guinness World Record beating competitive eater, the 38-year-old’s list of achievements make a revolting menu; 6.5Kg of strawberry shortcake in eight minutes, a kilogram of Frosties in six minutes and 102 Jaffa Cakes in three. (Although not all in one day. Each of these challenges takes a considerable amount of training and preparation.)

The charity worker chanced upon the strange hobby during Covid. While many people were baking bread in lockdown, Max was eating as much of it as humanly possible. ‘Some people learned to knit, and bake. I just learned to be a competitive eater,’ he tells Metro. 

Max has always liked food, and even as a child, his mum kept feeding him the things he didn’t like – courgettes for example – until he just forgot to dislike them. By the time he was in his twenties, he was eating large portions to sustain himself as he walked all over London, ran marathons and went to the gym every day. 

‘I used to eat healthy food, but I would eat a lot of it, which I think helped me gain a big capacity,’ he explains. ‘I was so busy in work, and I often am now, that I am used to one big meal a day that expands my stomach.’ 

Bored during lockdown, he tried eating challenges at home, and when he discovered he could scoff 100 chicken nuggets in one sitting, he started entering into all-you-can-eats at various restaurants.

Following one contest in which he consumed a metre-long hot dog in 18 minutes, he was entered into a competition against some of the world’s top eaters Leah Shutkever and Radim Dvořáček. Max was hooked. 

40 contests later, Max, has been champion of the British Eating League for the past three years and is now ranked number 16 in the world, a title he has earned all while working full time. 

His greatest achievement to date is his success in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, the world famous event held every 4 July in Coney Island, NY. He has eaten more hotdogs each year since his first entry in 2023, most recently shoving down 36.5 in ten minutes – a European record that won him seventh place. (He was penalised half a hotdog for leaving ‘debris’). 

It’s an equally impressive and disgusting watch. Like a Labrador that hasn’t been fed for a week, Max is laser-focussed on getting the meat into his mouth as quickly as possible. He rams the hot dogs in hamster-style, sometimes two at a time, before they immediately vanish, making room for more. It’s not a pretty sight but it is weirdly admirable.

‘It’s a strange subculture,’ he agrees. ‘No one likes to see someone separate a hot dog bun, stuff it into water and guzzle it down. It looks horrific. But they do like to watch me eat an enormous plate of amazing-looking food,’ he says. 

Which is how he has amassed hundreds of thousands of views online, where, as Max Vs Food, he tries to eat as huge portions as possible. And it is impressive stuff, as his ability to nail a ten pound pizza the size of a table in just under 24 minutes will attest. But his dream is to reach the highest ranks of hot dog eaters, eating 40 in ten minutes. 

The contest is not for the faint-hearted, with some doctors warning against competitive eating for fear of long term damage to the stomach and digestive system, let alone the choking risk.

In 2017 a student in the United States died after choking on pancakes during a charity eating contest, and two years later, a man in California choked to death while taking part in a taco-eating competition at a minor league baseball game.  

It is for this reason that paramedics keep a close watch at competitions. But Max is nonplussed. 

‘I have heard of other competitive eaters who have strained themselves or popped muscles or damaged the stomach. But I’ve never experienced anything like that. If you progress slowly, you reduce the risk of injury.’ 

Besides – Max is contest-ready all year round. His big gravy-soup-salads keep his stomach ready to go, and he fasts before any contest, carefully hitting the delicate balance of having an empty stomach and being hungry before the timer starts, without having fasted for so long that he’s too tired to eat. 

‘I equate it to a marathon. You can’t run one straight away; you have to really train. But as you start to do it, you enjoy it more and more, you get better at it and you just want to keep pushing yourself.’ 

And just like an Olympian, he experiences nerves before a contest and extreme fatigue afterwards. Think of the post-Christmas dinner coma supermaxxed. 

‘You feel lucid afterwards. Food drunk, almost. You get a food high, but you also feel exhausted. There have been so many times I’ve fallen asleep on a train after a contest or been in a food coma and my partner Laura has had to really help me back, because I’ve just been so full.

‘After one of my early food challenges, a five-minute walk to the train station took me half an hour because I was just so full and tired. It is this full-body fatigue.’ 

And it takes its toll on his personal life too. When Max isn’t working, he’s eating, practicing, fasting, travelling to a contest or making content.

He is grateful to Laura, who comes to all his events, films him for his channels and supports him in all he does – and is used to explaining to friends that while Max will join them for dinner, he may not be eating because he is in fact fasting. 

And even when not preparing for a contest, Max loves to overeat in his spare time. When he turned 38 last month, to celebrate his birthday, he went to Pizza Express and ate 11 pizzas.

‘Laura only managed one and a half pizzas, and she asked me – how do you enjoy feeling so full? I don’t know. I just do. It’s just the sense of accomplishment and knowing that if I want to eat 57 mince pies in ten minutes – I can.

‘And I really enjoyed those 11 pizzas. They were delicious. I even had room for an ice cream sundae for pudding.’