The 20K Club

Insomnia strikes at inopportune moments sometimes. I figured I may as well do something productive.

This post is a reflection on the "20K Club," an informal competitive eating association borne of a Facebook conversation between Johnnie Excel and Matt Stonie regarding the feasibility of consuming 20,000 calories in one sitting.

That's a hell of a lot of calories to put down in one run. For the sake of perspective, 4 lbs of peanut butter would only get you to 11,000 calories.

Come to think of it, there's many of us who might have yet to enter the 10K Club. It's tough to say... but plates like the one pictured above might certainly help.

That's a heap of soft serve ice cream buried under five dense pieces of cheesecake. It reminds me of those ridiculously oversized dessert plates you would see on Ben Monson's bodybuilding.com page, though clearly Ben did it bigger.

You're gonna need to eat several of these plates to even remotely approach 20k. Maybe you could try candy bars - between 90 and 100 would take you to 20,000 calories.

The 20K Club has some rules in place that make the task even more daunting. For example, you can't simply eat large quantities of calorie-dense ingredients such as butter or mayonnaise to achieve high totals. You have to consume actual foods or ingredients assembled into legitimate dishes. Foods used must also be sourced from nutrition labels so that the calorie counts may be verified. And: the consumption must be captured on one continuous video clip for posterity.

That's complicated enough. And pretty straightforward.

There's many ways to enter the hallowed Hall of Fame (which is still barren). Do 11 lbs of animal crackers sound good to anyone?