By: Alan Chen
James Webb is a competitive food eater who is 34 years old. He quit his job so he could compete in food contests in America and Australia, so he could earn lots of money by eating very quickly.
In the first food contest he competed in, he ate 38 pancakes in one hour and broke the Australian record in Brisbane. A couple weeks later he ate 17 sausage sizzle sandwiches in Melbourne, where he again broke the record.
Later in Toowoomba he finished a 3.5kg doughnut in under 20 minutes. He also came in third place in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, where he ate 47 hotdogs in under 10 minutes.
It is an amazing accomplishment for Mr. Webb who overcame obesity to be a semi-professional soccer player and after that overcame an illness that made him stay in the hospital for 8 entire months.
That illness was Guillain-Barre syndrome and it is an auto-immune disorder. He got it when he was 27. GBS is a rare syndrome where the immune system attacks the owner’s nerves.
The illness can cause paralysis which means your body can’t move. Mr. Webb couldn’t walk and needed a ventilator to even breathe. Doctors told him he would never walk again.
Mr. Webb said that, “Basically, I went to sleep one night as a professional soccer player and woke up paralyzed.” He also developed cataracts, which means the eyeballs lens become cloudy.
But thanks to an eye surgery and other treatments, Mr. Webb taught himself how to walk and breathe without a ventilator again. He was also able to see things again. He is now healthy and weighs 91 kg, has 10% body fat, and he goes to the gym every single day.
He eats about 15 kg of food but doesn’t get unfit because he exercises a lot. He says that a lot of people think that speed eaters are all fat or obese, but that that is only a myth.
The world’s top 10 speed eaters are a professional power-lifter, a cyclist, an endurance runner, and 2 professional bodybuilders.
Mr. Webb’s journey to becoming a professional speed eater began when he began eating 5 kg hamburger, wedges, fries, onion rings, three cans of soft drinks, and a piece of cheesecake at a cessnock restaurant.
Someone who was watching sent a video of what Mr. Webb did and reported it to a local newspaper, who sent it to Channel 9. When Mr. Webb woke up, his mother was asking him why he was on TV.
In the beginning of 2022, America’s Major-league Eating, or MLE for short, invited Mr. Webb to join them in their food competitions. He completed 26 whole food challenges and food contests in 10 days and became a professional world-wide eater.