Please, put down the fork. You're embarrassing yourself.  Your Sunday breakfast is strictly amateur. What is that, one waffle? Two eggs? And you're chewing?

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Please, put down the fork. You're embarrassing yourself.

 Your Sunday breakfast is strictly amateur. What is that, one waffle? Two eggs? And you're chewing?

 Dude, you are a French poodle in the pit-bull world of competitive eating.

 “Have you ever seen somebody eat 10 pounds of meatballs in 12 minutes?” asks Bob Shoudt. “That's more meatballs than a normal person eats in probably a year.”

Shoudt is a balding, 39-year-old vegetarian and IT manager who's often recognized in public. He and his wife have three kids, so he goes to dance recitals and preschool graduations and Little League games.
 Pretty normal guy, right?

Well, yes, except the 30 or so weekends a year he goes by the name “Humble Bob” and gorges himself on all kinds of meat products. He ate 53 hamburgers in eight minutes last year and is the No. 5 ranked competitive eater in the world.

Please let that sentence sink in a little bit.

“I was raised on buffets,” he says, “and always got my money's worth. It looked easy. I thought, ‘If those guys can do it, I can do it.'.”

Competitive eating is a multimillion-dollar industry. Thousands watch it in person, millions have seen it on TV. It's made Takeru Kobayashi into a household name in America and so popular in Japan he won't allow pictures of his girlfriend for fear of retribution from jealous female fans.

Eating ridiculously large amounts of food in short periods of time is either innocent fun or dangerous gluttony, fast-growing sport or gross sideshow.

Just depends on your perspective.

The thought of eating 53 hamburgers in eight minutes — that's one every nine seconds, buns and all — probably makes you a little sick to your stomach.

But be honest: Don't you wonder how many you could put down?

“I can't get into figure skating because I can't do (crap) on a skate,” says Rich Shea, co-founder of the International Federation of Competitive Eating. “But I know what it's like to eat a hot dog, so that's interesting. When you're at a stop light, we'd all like to go ahead and put it in gear and see what happens. There's a wow factor.

“There's a huge wow factor.”
 
In some ways, competitive eating happens all over the world, every day, every time two or more guys sit down over a plate of nachos.

“There's a disconnect when you see LeBron James hit a jump shot,” says Ryan Nerz, who wrote “Eat This Book” and emcees eating competitions. “You look and say, ‘the guy's 6-8, 240 pounds, faster than me, stronger than me, jumps higher than me.'

“With eating you think, ‘I've always thought I could eat a lot. Maybe I could do good with pie.'.”

Sam Mellinger | McClatchy Newspapers