On Friday, we asked you to share your sordid tales of gluttony. What’s the most you’ve ever overeaten, and what were the consequences? You told us so many, all of them gross in their own unique ways, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from them, it’s that you should never, ever, ever agree to a restaurant’s eating challenge again. Steer clear of all-you-can-eat offerings, too. You’ll understand once you read the best of our readers’ overeating stories.
Near where I used to live is a place called Pizza Party that has a “Belly Buster Challenge” which involves eating a pizza that’s 20” across. It’s a pretty legit challenge (reigning champion at the time was Joey Chestnut).
One evening my mother-in-law is visiting from out of town and her and my wife have a girl’s night out. Somewhere along this time, I decided it’d be a good idea to test run the Belly Buster Challenge. Since you have to be in the restaurant for the actual challenge, I figured I’d do a test at my home to see if I could actually complete the challenge (something about attempting to finish an eating challenge by yourself in public seemed a little too sad).
I ordered a ham and pineapple (the challenge required a minimum of two toppings and I figured I could save any that’s leftover). I’ll save the gory details, but my wife and mother-in-law came home to find me groaning on the couch, with two squares of pizza in front of me. When my wife asked if I was going to finishes the slices I apparently replied, “NO! No more pizza. No more!” When my mother-in-law asked what happened, I promptly b-lined for our bathroom and threw up.
As an added bonus result, I constantly sweated for the next two days and had an old pizza smell coming out of my pores.
Extremely gross steak story afoot from miketoast:
A restaurant near me J&R’s Steakouse, has an eating challenge where you get an hour to eat a 72oz steak plus sides and it’s free, otherwise it’s $49.99. A bunch of friends went there for my brother’s bday and all 4 of the guys decided it was time to go for it. One ordered it rare, he was done in 24oz, ching ching $50 bucks gone and 48 more ounces of rare, bleeding meat to take home. My brother ordered medium rare, after 20 minutes he sent it back to get cooked further and damn near finished it in the alloted hour. Ching Ching, $50 bucks birthday boy. The third guy chugged and chugged and barely finished it in the hour but he did it, winnah winnah free big assed steak dinna! I finished that sumbitch in 32 minutes, still hungry I ate the rest of the appetizers still sitting on the table, then I ate the rest of my buddy’s wife’s chicken, then dessert and when I got home, a dozen or so pretzel rods. Suddenly, sitting on the couch, the meat sweats started. Sweat was pouring out of every pore on my body, soaking my clothes. I became dizzy and tipped over like a newborn baby propped in a chair. I had the presence of mind wobble to the bathroom to pop a few imodium since I figured I knew what was brewing in my gut, I had heard the rumors of meat overdosing, they drill them into us at home at school, everywhere, don’t use kids! I crawled into the bedroom and fell asleep, having insanely vivid dreams and the colors, wow the colors. I woke up the next morning, showered and checked my phone. You see, my buddy’s weren’t as smart as I was, fisting a handful of immodium down my throat immediately upon returning home, and my phone was full of texts (including some nasty ass pics) detailing the pain and agony wrought upon these men by a side of beef on a plate. One shit so much he couldn’t even wipe anymore because his asshole was so raw, another shit the bed and had to stop every 20 minutes the next day while working his job as a cable service tech and the other literally cried himself to sleep naked in the bathtub with shit drizzling out of his butthole
I eventually did shit, maybe 3 or 4 days later, and it was a Bunyanesque log, 4 feet long if it was an inch, solid as can be sticking up out of the water. You coulda used it as a coat rack, a thing of beauty. It needed to be broken up into fives just to get it to go down
The morale of the story, imodium is a helluva drug. I hereby grant them permission to use this story for their next ad campaign.
Unlimited wings is too many wings. ro37:
Quaker Steak and Lube offered (at least at the time) an all you can eat Wings for $8.99 deal on weds when I was in college. So of course, my friends and I decided it would be a good idea to have a wing eating contest.
Subtext: I am 5’6, and at hte time weighed about 130, so I wasn’t exactly the right build to win a wing eating contest, especially against my good friend who was 6’4 and thin, but could eat like a horse.
So most of my friends gave up after consuming a measly 25-30 wings, but I hate losing. So cardboard plate after plate piled up. I finally gave up after I ate 54 wings. My friend casually polished off 103.
I don’t think either of us pooped for 5 days.
Another overeating story from the same place. Abe Thunderwolf:
My friends and I went to Quaker Steak & Lube (Pittsburgh wing joint, it’s meh) for their All You Can Eat Night my junior year of high school. For $10, you get to join in the Pittsburgh tradition of being a fat, overeating slob covered in wing sauce and sweat., so naturally we were all for it.
Naturally we made a contest of it, and being 17 and a three sport athlete my appetite and metabolism were basically limitless. 113 wings later, I felt like a champion and a lard. The three days after that were spent running to the bathroom with terrified thoughts of A) not making it in time and B) the fire that my butthole was about to feel (remember, if it’s hot going in, it’s hot going out). I think I probably pooped 30 times in those three days.
Moral of the story, don’t eat a ton of hot wings.
Be wary of wings. SoullessMonster:
Near the LBI shore house we rented one summer there was a wing joint (Still there - The Chicken or the Egg) that had enormous wings. They had one of those challenge deals where if you eat 15 of their Nuclear wings in 15 minutes you got a free t-shirt, so one weekend (not coincidentally, the weekend my fiance was away with friends) we accepted said challenge. Told them a day in advance we’d be coming, set an off-hour where we could expect to have the place to ourselves. And gave the owner time to prepare.
It seems he didn’t really want to give away shirts. I love hot food but these were not fit for human consumption. After two my mouth was on fire, I was pouring sweat and my stomach was already feeling weird. The more intelligent among us bailed immediately. One very small guy went into what the pre-med student in our group diagnosed as “mild shock”. Four of us completed the challenge. That night some guys didn’t even make it out, and those of us who did drank less than usual and turned in early.
Next morning I had to get up early as I was picking fiance up at JFK airport. Three of us (3 of the 4 “winners”) got in my car, made it over the bridge to the mainland, and stopped at the first gas station because one guy had to use the toilet. We stayed there for over 45 minutes, taking turns fouling the one men’s room, at least twice apiece. Eventually an attendant or whatever came over and told me he was calling the police, that we shouldn’t be doing drugs on his property. We told him what happened and he found it very amusing. The car ride home took almost 6 hours and my digestive system was in an uproar for days.
The shirt I got was size medium. I never wore it once.
2 pound hamburger challenge at a restaurant in Ft Lauderdale called “The Bearded Clam: A nice place to eat out” (swear on my sons life that was the name). If you finish the burger in 30 minutes or less (plus fries), the meal was free. I finished the burger in 10.5 minutes (second fastest ever). The manager was having such a fun time with it, he offered to also pay for my bar tab the whole night. However, after inhaling 2.5 pounds of red meat I had to go home and sleep for the next 14 hours. My friend who also attempted the challenge had to sprint to the bathroom and puked all over the floor. I still contest he is DQed for puking.
Don’t do all-you-can-eat food situations. Just don’t. VictorH:
Meet Scott. Scott likes sushi. He especially likes all you can eat sushi. Scott goes to AYCE sushi with a number of friends. Scott’s group is so big that they have to split them at two tables. Scott ends up with Girl A and Girl B
Girl A was married to one of Scott’s best friends from college. WAS. Girl A ended up cheating on him after they had a daughter. Scott’s friend is now an awesome dad with an awesome new wife and an awesome daughter. Girl A’s parents still like Scott’s friend better than her.
Girl B got around the group. Everyone except me, I think. Girl B also had the worst dating history, aka the best stories about awful guys from J-Date.
Scott is uncomfortable with the situation, obviously. An ex and an awful human being. Scott does his best to play nice and have a pleasant dinner. And AYCE dinner.
At some point, Girl A and Girl B start arguing about something. Scott left his 40 foot pole at home, so he keeps eating. And eating. And ordering more to eat. somewhere in the 45 to 50 piece area, Scott doesn’t feel so good. Scott gets up from the table, which actually stops the argument at the table. Scott runs outside. Scott looks left. Scott looks right.
Scott realizes that it’s the middle of winter, he’s wearing no coat, there are people on the street, and that he has little choice. Scott walks up to the mound of plowed snow on the curb and vomits rainbow colored sushi.
The sushi freezes, just outside the door to the restaurant, for all to see.
We still make fun of Scott to this day. He forced himself to eat so that he didn’t have to talk. So much that he lost it all.
Know when to say stop, we learn from ShamrockFury:
Texas de Brazil, summer of 2014. Now if you don’t know about Texas de Brazil, it’s a goddamn meat free for all. Brazilian style steakhouse where they bring around various meats on skewers, including the ever delicious bacon wrapped filet mignon. They do not stop bringing more meat to your table until you flip over a damn card that tells them to stop, leave me alone, I’m already dead inside. So of course I weigh myself before and after. 5.2lbs of meat was ingested. I had to keep myself from vomiting in the parking lot and for the entire ride home. This meat stayed lodged in my lower intestine for 4 days. 4 days of god awful farts and sweating and bloating. And on the 5th day, the toilet was clogged, and it was good.
Jezebel’s own Jia Tolentino:
Hey, I’ve got a tight story about overeating!
The situation is that I was two months into Peace Corps in a country where everyone literally only eats potatoes, and so I had eaten nothing but potatoes for two months. (I don’t really like potatoes.) To accompany the potatoes, you could drink vodka that cost 50 cents per liter or water that you had to filter through a large contraption that would regularly fill itself with mold. I would say that a full third of my volunteer class had a gastrointestinal virus at any given moment, and also that if I ever took a shit in this life that resembled the shits I took in Peace Corps, I would immediately call 911.
So, that summer, as a result of a casual “impending civil war,” we got evacuated to an Air Force base, the one where all the Afghanistan missions are staged. This Air Force base in terms of food was the exact opposite of Peace Corps: the dining hall had fruit imported from Europe, steak and lobster nights, rare condiments that we stole immediately, and just—stuff good enough that in 2010 it cost US taxpayers $37 per meal. Everyone in Peace Corps, having been subsisting on potatoes, vodka and badly filtered water for two months to two years of time, went full Augustus Gloop upon entering the base. Simultaneously, I got sicker than I have ever been in my life, with this absolutely nuclear case of giardia, which, like, if you have ever had it, you know exactly when you have it, and I knew exactly that I had it. You’re supposed to chill out and give your sick bod of break, but we were at the base and I was fucking starving so I was like, I’m first going to see if I can cure myself by eating an appetizer of cinnamon rolls, a large mac & cheese scoop, and two full racks of baby back ribs. It spectacularly didn’t work. I was insanely ill over the course of this forced evacuation, so to speak, and I also refused to stop eating. My friends literally tried to prevent me from entering the dining hall by the end of day two and I was like, “Don’t worry guys, I have wised up, I’m just going to drink water and have some fruit” and then I would eat an entire thing of taxpayer brisket because it felt so good going down and then I would feel sulfur coming up my esophagus and then the circle of life began disgustingly anew.
This, even accounting for the brief period in college where I would go on regular “dates” with my boyfriend to Qdoba, then the movies, then Waffle House, and then home to make Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, is the only bad time I’ve ever had overeating.
If you don’t know what butterfish is, maybe you should ask. Hit Bull Win Steak learned the hard way:
First girl I dated post-divorce, had me over her house to make me dinner. On the menu that night was something called “butterfish.” I had never eaten if before, and after trying some thought it was delicious. So good in fact, I had two whole filets plus the portion of hers that she was too full to finish.
For those who don’t know (as I didn’t at the time) butterfish contains high-levels of an oily substance called “wax esters” that your body doesn’t digest. That’s why it’s apparently recommended that adults don’t eat more than one serving (filet) at a time. These esters in turn have a number of lovely side effects in certain people that include things like stomach aches, diarrhea, oh and “orange anal leakage” that reeks of fish oil. Due to the oils in it, you really had little control or warning when it came or went. For the next three fucking days I couldn’t go more than 100 yards from a toilet for fear of not being able to stop O.A.L. from running out of my ass and down my leg at any moment. This included having to bail on a follow up date.
My Canadian cousin came down to the states once and decided to stay with my parents for a few days. I’d met him once like 15 years before, and my mom wanted us to get together so they decided to drive the 100 miles to come out and visit me in the middle of the week. I decide that I’m going to give him the best American dining experience I can muster, so we get dinner at this awesome BBQ place.
We start with the thickest bloody marys I’ve ever had and some burnt ends as an appetizer. Then beer. Then brisket. Then more beer. Then I get a full rack of ribs with potato casserole, beans, corn bread, and more burnt ends. After we’re done, I’m about to explode, but I have to show him this awesome bar, so we go head over and drink 3 more beers (including a 10% abv imperial stout). After that, my parents want me to take him to the bar with the best banana cream pie ever for desert.
We sit at the bar and everyone gets their own personal pie which is easily big enough for 2 people and about 32,000 calories. This whole time we’re trying more beer, and eventually moving on to scotch to finish up the night. Then I say goodbye and drunkenly stumble back to my apartment.
I wake up about 3 hours later and it feels like I swallowed a brick, and someone is kicking it further into my stomach. I stumble in to the bathroom and unleash some unholy brown greasewater in the toilet. About 10 seconds in, the feeling that one exit isn’t going to be sufficient to handle this situation hits and I go into full on panic mode. I manage to get turned around somehow and am face to face with the horror I had just wrought. I puke till there’s nothing left, turn back around, and spend the next 20 minutes sweatily slumped over onto the side of sink. The aftershocks continue for hours.
My girlfriend eventually gets up to check on me and I have no answer for “why didn’t you just puke in the trash can?”
Why indeed.
I’m not a very big guy (5’7” 165) so there were times when I was younger I surprised people by how much I could eat. I remember I was about 17 the first time I truly ever felt full. However, I REALLY remember the first time I went past full.
In college, I was an intern at a company in Houston. At the end of the summer, our HR rep who hired all of us took to Pappadeaux’s for dinner. Another guy and I got the Pappadeaux platter (after some shared appetizers for the 12 of us). As it slowly morphed into an eating contest, we finished our plates as the waiter said, “I’ve worked her for almost four years, and you are the second and third people I’ve seen finish the whole thing.” Even though we should have stopped eating 30 minutes prior, we then ordered dessert. We were both about half way through a slice of pie and decided to call it a draw. I stuck my fork in the pie as if to plant a flag of surrender, looked up with a devilish grin and scooped up another bite. I don’t even remember if he kept going too.
The aftermath was just pitiful. I was dating one of the other interns (who is now my wife) and the three of us went hang out at her apartment after dinner. I was laying on the couch with my pants unsnapped, and my buddy was in a similar state sitting in a chair. I was in a vegetative state staring at the TV while the two of them talked about poetry. And my now-wife kept a watchful eye on us to make sure we didn’t barf on her furniture - somehow we didn’t puke at all.
My wife (then girlfriend) surprised me for Valentine’s Day by getting my favorite item from every fast food place in town. I ate the following in one sitting because you can’t say no to the favorites:
Taco Bell Chili Cheese Burrito
Hot N Spicy McChicken
Supersized Fries
Burger King Chicken Sandwich
Breakfast Jack with bacon
Chick-Fil-A Chicken Sandwich
Sonic Tater Tots
Orange Chicken (with fried rice)
2 Fazoli’s Breadsticks
Oreo Shake
Peanut Butter Blizzard
I’m missing a few because I don’t remember all of it.
I managed not to vomit, but I didn’t sleep a wink because I couldn’t breathe. And I clogged the industrial toilet at work the next day before even wiping.
When I was in the 4th grade, my mom came home one night with a gigantic tin foil wrapped pile of teriyaki sticks. They were something I’d never had before, and after she convinced me to try a bite of one I decided that I really liked them a lot. I proceeded to mindlessly eat the entire stack of them while playing Zelda II the Adventure of Link sitting on the floor in front of our little TV.
Right as I went to bed, I started to notice trouble. That trouble turned into a night of vomiting and dry heaving like I’d never experienced before or since. For years, correction... decades after this incident, I would get nauseous just thinking about the smell or taste of teriyaki to the point of hearing the word teriyaki being a trigger. Seeing and smelling teriyaki had on a few occasions made me vomit or try to vomit.
I don’t know if it’s my imagination or what, but it has been a long time since I’ve seen the same kind of teriyaki that I ate that night. What you see in restaurants today seems.. different. I actually quite like it. Maybe that was some kind of shitty teriyaki style that nobody does anymore? I have no idea. What I do know is that I quite like teriyaki now, but when recalling the memory of what I ate/smelled that night I still get a little queasy.
Don’t be like the following mayo boy, Brian:
When I was in 4th grade, I would often come home to an empty house after school, where I would often fix myself a snack before plopping down in front of the Disney Afternoon for some Tale Spin and Darkwing Duck. One day, knowing there were some flour tortillas in the fridge, I thought I would make myself what I called a roll up, lunch meat and cheese in a tortilla. Well I was right about the tortilla, but we had no meat nor cheese. The only other ingredient for my planned snack we did have was my go to condiment: mayonnaise. Being in 4th grade, I figured I could make up for the dearth of meat and cheese simply by piling on more of the condiment. I filled up that tortilla as best I could with Hellman’s, and wrapped it up into the world’s first, and hopefully last, mayo burrito. I was pretty proud of my cleverness and ingenuity, until I took the first bite; I knew immediately that I had made a huge mistake. “So, why is this an overeating story?” you ask. Well, dear readers, because I finished it. My second bite was hopeful, thinking, maybe the first bite was anomaly. After the third bite was most definitely not the charm (this was after all, a burrito with exactly one ingredient; mayonnaise) I don’t know what kept me going. I stood, hunched over the kitchen trash can, staring at the seemingly endless tube of white goo below me, dreading every bite but determined to finish the damn thing. I stood over the trash, but refused to actually throw this burritabomination away. Maybe I was afraid of wasting food. Maybe I was afraid my parents would see it if I had thrown it in the trash and ask me questions for which I had no answer. We’ll never know. What I do know: I finished the burrito and didn’t eat mayonnaise for a year. At least it didn’t ruin Tale Spin.
MostlyKelp (bop bop bop bop be da bup bebop cola yeah!):
I think I’ve posted this story before, but I ate an entire bag of tangerines and my palms turned orange. Too much Beta-Carotene. DO NOT DO THIS, YOU WILL SHIT SO MUCH ACID.
And finally, a story involving a former boy-band member, via Michael Roselli:
As you may know, I went to Taiwan with Joey Fatone. We flew into JFK on the way home, and since Joey grew up in Brooklyn right around the block from L&B (he lives in Orlando now) we had to make a stop.
With all our luggage in tow, we ordered a large (24-cut) square pie. There were four of us, and we had 6 slices left over. After having been in Taiwan for a week, you can imagine how good this felt. That is, until the owner of L&B saw Joey, and demanded we come inside.
He wouldn’t stop bringing out food. It started with a massive plate of shrimp cocktail, then a plate of ziti with sausage, then “jersey corn”, then a kind of veal marsala over MASHED POTATOES, and then he killed us with a giant dessert that could feed Brooklyn itself. Even Joey was hurting.
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