I’ve been watching competitive eating on YouTube since early 2024. I was in the midst of a keto diet phase (it was a mistake; I don’t recommend it), and I think the YouTube algorithm sensed I was hungry. Initially, I was disgusted by watching Erik the Electric eat meals featured on My 600-Pound Life x2 four times in a day but continued watching his videos anyway. These days I mostly just think it’s impressive. I don’t watch all the competitive eaters, I may not even watch the best ones, but below is my ranked list of eaters that I watch regularly or have otherwise made an impression.
1. Erik the Electric
The YouTuber who introduced me to competitive eating has to go at the top of the list for multiple reasons. Erik’s videos are unique among all competitive eaters that I watch. Unlike other eaters listed here, Erik rarely does restaurant challenges. Instead, he sets challenges for himself. For the past three years, he’s based these challenges around a theme or a story. In his most recent video as of this writing, for example, he trained an AI, presumably on his previous challenges, to create a 14-day-long challenge for him to follow to prove he was still the “World’s Hungriest Man” as his tagline proclaims. His previous format, which he used when he posted challenges weekly, usually included eating a ridiculous amount of calories while showcasing new foods, entire menus, and seasonal specials at fast food restaurants and grocery stores.
Currently, Erik posts videos at a much slower cadence than other competitive eaters. It’s not out of the ordinary for months to pass between videos, but they’re always worth the wait for Erik’s humor, storytelling, and unique video editing style. Erik has a way of making food look delicious or at least making the challenge of eating a large quantity of it exciting (because, really, eating a 1-pound gummy bear in one sitting is disgusting no matter how you frame it). Where other competitive eaters merely tell the viewer how tasty their 10,000 calorie burger is week after week, Erik emphasizes his enthusiastic “Mmm!”s with fist pounds, camera shakes, video and audio effects, and animated fireballs. His challenges and loose storylines have plot twists, obstacles, and rising and falling action, and his onscreen calorie counters, timers, and progress graphics further emphasize the difficulty of his challenges and keep you wondering if he’s finally given himself too great of a challenge.
Erik’s backstory also distinguishes him other eaters. Like most eaters, Erik is an exercise enthusiast, his particular interests being in power lifting, bike riding, and most recently triathlons. He found these passions and competitive eating, however, after years of struggling with anorexia. It was his discovery that he could eat massive quantities of food and still maintain a healthy weight that ultimately gave him a better relationship with food.
I also have to put Erik at the top for the effect he’s had on me, and not only by introducing me to competitive eating. Don’t worry. He hasn’t inspired me to want to eat a sickening amount of food. He did, however, inspire me to try all the food. When I went to restaurants, I used to ask myself, “What’s the ‘safest’ thing on the menu, or what have I tried that I know is ‘safe’?” I often ordered the same foods over and over again. Now when I go to restaurants, I ask myself, “What haven’t I tried before that I’d like to try?” I keep a list of restaurants and menus from around Missoula with notes about what I liked, what I didn’t like, and what I thought about what I’ve tried. I’ve ordered from fast food places and restaurants that I’ve never tried before. I’ve ordered tasty food and desserts that I’d never considered. The inspiration came from simply watching Erik try all manner of tasty-looking foods. I wanted to try them, too. If he could eat a disgusting amount of food and be perfectly fine, why couldn’t I be fine giving a reasonable portion a try? Obviously, I’m not on the keto diet anymore, and I partly thank Erik for that as well.
2. Max vs. Food
I only found Max vs. Food a few months ago through collaborations with Katina Eats Kilos and Randy Santel, but he’s quickly risen to the second spot in my tier list. Max posts bi-weekly videos, featuring mostly restaurant speed and/or capacity challenges and some food-eating competitions and at-home challenges. Max is impressive for both his speed and his capacity. I rarely see him fail a challenge due to running out of time or feeling too sick to continue, and I’ve never seen him eat to the point of getting sick. He almost always breaks previous time records and out-eats the eaters he collaborates with. Alongside his bi-weekly, self-edited videos, he also works a fulltime job and runs several hours a day.
Max is enthusiastic and entertaining. His video format follows Katina Eats Kilos’ style where video of him eating is lightly edited, sped up, and overlayed with music and Max narrating his thoughts throughout the challenge. While videos in this style also include live audio of the eater interacting with the staff and audience, I find the additional narration makes it more interesting by adding observations and doubts that the eater might not admit aloud. Max makes food look good and rarely shows misery during a challenge, even when he says he’s struggling. While some eaters strategize how they approach a challenge, such as eating all the meat first, Max often has more fun with his food, attempting to eat giant burgers whole, making sandwiches from piles of meat and bread, and saving his favorites for last. His significant other Laura often assists, coaches, and supports him from behind the camera, which keeps me rooting for him when times are dire as well.
Being based in the UK, he also eats a lot of tasty-looking English breakfasts.
3. Katina Eats Kilos
Katina found competitive eating through the world of bikini competitions. In these competitions, natural competitors (i.e. non-steroid users) such a Katina ride a fine line between building muscle and remaining lean. After a competition, Katina decided to try competitive eating as a method of building muscle or bulking. She has since become a professional eater, although she maintains a strict regimen of weightlifting and bike riding. Katina isn’t a speed eater, but what interested me in her was her impressive capacity for being my size.
Katina also streams World of Warcraft regularly on Twitch. She brings her well-practiced narration to her weekly (recently turned bimonthly) videos to keep them engaging with her inner thoughts.
4. Randy Santel
Randy isn’t particularly impressive for his speed or unmaintained physique. Even his capacity is questionable at the frequency with which he struggles through or fails challenges. This may be, however, because he frequently eats one or two challenges a day for weeks at a time while on tour to accumulate videos to post over a much longer timeline while he’s not on tour. He has also beaten over a thousand restaurant challenges across the United States and around the world and owns foodchallenges.com, which maintains a global list of food challenges and tips for how to eat big and maintain physique. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess he’s one of the original professional eaters on YouTube and has inspired many of those that exist today.
Unlike other competitive eaters here, Randy doesn’t edit his own videos, and it shows. His videos are very formulaic, and since he has the beginning and end of the videos to share most of his thoughts, the introductions and closings can be drawn out. Randy is enthusiastic and infinitely supportive, but he usually comes across as showy and obnoxious rather than charming.
I discovered Randy through his fiancé Katina Eats Kilos. When I hear the two of them supporting each other off camera, I suppose I have to support both, although I find Katina more entertaining and impressive. Randy has recently decreased his schedule from bi-weekly to weekly videos in preparation for his marriage to Katina. He plans to retire as a professional eater when his new YouTube channel–featuring his knowledge as a dietician–grows to a sustainable size.
He also managed to find a challenge in Missoula:
5. Matt Stonie
Matt Stonie reminds me of Ryan Higa except instead of making short films with his Asian friends, his Asian friends film him cooking and eating disgusting food. Matt specializes in speed eating but has an impressive capacity as well. I don’t watch many of his videos, but most that I’ve seen feature home challenges he creates for himself, mostly focusing on challenging textures, uniformity, and flavors. As mentioned, Matt’s editing and video style reminds me a lot of Ryan Higa short films and also Erik the Electric videos. He doesn’t, however, make food look good and frequently fails his own challenges.
6. Molly Schuyler
As one of the top professional eaters in the world, Molly Schuyler doesn’t chew. She just swallows.
That said, I don’t go out of my way to watch her videos. Despite her ability to eat a two-foot long cheesesteak and an entire tray of cheese fries in less than three minutes, she’s not very entertaining. Of the few videos I’ve seen, there is somewhat uninformative and meandering introductions, bad audio, and zero narration during the challenges. Unlike most of the eaters I’ve listed here, she’s also not a “clean eater,” frequently turning her food to mush before stuffing it in her mouth.
I do appreciate seeing her on other eaters’ channels though. As long as someone else is handling the entertaining, video editing, and audio, she is very impressive and worth watching.