Badlands is back!
Eric “Badlands” Booker, the competitive eater/rapper/No. 7 train conductor, is returning to the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest on Friday after nearly two years away from the “game.”
We talked to him about his return, how he dropped some weight and, of course, hot dogs.
Why did you decide to retire in the first place?
I wanted to re-evaluate my game and drop a little weight and just take steps to get better at the game so I could come back strong.
So have you dropped some weight over the past two years?
Yeah, I actually dropped 100 pounds since then.
Wow! What are you down to now?
I’m at 380 right now.
What was the most you ever weighed?
I was 470. I had did a show called “Wife Swap,” and we filmed that right after Nathan’s [in 2006]. During the course of the show, they got me on the scale. I said, “Let me just take a little break and try to slim down and try to get my eating game better.
How did you lose the weight?
I think through a lot of cardio, and I drank a lot of water.
Changed your diet any?
Yeah, I just stopped eating all that McDonald’s and all that Chinese food.
You had the event down in Camden, N.J. this weekend. Have you found that dropping the weight has helped your game?
Yeah, it helped a lot. Just the fact that I feel lighter and my capacity has grown a lot since then. Once I dropped the weight, everything just started to feel a lot better.
Why is that? You would think that bigger people could eat more hot dogs, but we look at Kobayashi or Sonya [“The Black Widow” Thomas], who are pretty small people, and they put down a ridiculous amount.
Actually, a lot of people think that the bigger you are, the more you can eat. But size actually doesn’t matter. It’s basically how you train. If you train your stomach to eat large amounts of food, it doesn’t matter how big or how small you are. The stomach muscle is the same size. It’s just how you train it. The stomach doesn’t really stretch like a balloon. It just unfolds. It’s kind of like an accordion. It’s just like a muscle in the gym. The more stress you put it under in the gym, it adapts to it.
How did it feel to win the event in Camden and earn a spot in the Nathan’s contest?
That was the best feeling. It solidified me coming back to the game. There were some good eaters there. … Just the fact that I put up a decent number – I wanted to do a little more, but 27½ is pretty decent. The conditions were pretty hot; it was 98 degrees, and we were on two flatbeds. The heat from the flatbed was radiating up. It was really hot. The elements were against us.
Explain to me your training regimen.
Basically you need four things in order to do well as a competitive eater. You need stomach capacity, of course. Most of the time what I do to train my stomach is to eat large amounts of vegetables, whether it be cabbage, cucumber slices, stuff like that – lots of low-calorie food. You definitely don’t want to train by eating hot dogs twice a week. That’s not the way to train. You have to get your stomach used to having lots of food in it, but you don’t want to train with high-calorie, high-fat food.
You’ve got to have stamina. I do my little treadmill, and I go work in the gym to keep my stamina up for the 12 minutes or 10 minutes or the six minutes that are involved.
You have to make sure that you have a good eating strategy. I make sure I have a game plan as far as eating the hot dogs or the burritos or strawberry shortcake or whatever. I basically take the food like a week before … and analyze an eating strategy. See what’s been done in the past and try to figure out something new.
And most importantly to have a strong focused mind. Basically, try to block out everything that may distract me at the table. Pretty much, you need those four things, and if you have that then you’ll be what I call “hungry and focused.”
Can you share what your game plan will be?
My eating style, I call it the “Double Japanese.” Basically, it’s similar to what Takeru Kobayashi does. What he does is he separates the hot dog and the bun. He eats the dog first, breaks it in half and then he eats both halves. Then he breaks the bun in half and dips it in the water and then gets it to the point where he can just swallow the bun. It has lots of names. They call it “Japanese” … and all types of things. But I figured out, since I’m a little bigger than he is, why snap them in half? So what I do is I take two dogs, eat them, then I take two buns, and I soak them and I drink the buns down. It’s a little quicker than his method.
