Wing Bowl XX

It's the Friday before the Super Bowl, and you know what that means, right?

WING BOWL!

Yep -- it's the annual Super Bowl for competitive chicken wing eaters! Held at Philadelphia's Wells Fargo Center, the Wing Bowl is one of competitive eating's showcase events, with thousands of spectators in attendance, including "the Wingettes, the name given to the bikini- and lingerie-wearing young women who make up each eater's contingent of supporters."

More than 125 Wingettes, a record for the event, competed to be declared "Wingette of the Year." Nicole, a pretty brunette, won the title and a 2012 Harley Davidson Sportster motorcycle. Also attending the event as featured Wingettes were adult film actresses Jenna Jameson and Mary Carey.

Clearly, the Wing Bowl is totally legit!

The winner? The legendary Takeru Kobayashi, who downed 337 wings in 30 minutes:

(I love how the reporter assumes that the native of Japan isn't accustomed to eating chicken wings. For the record: (1) people in Japan eat chicken wings, and (2) Kobayashi will eat just about anything.)

I was actually rooting for Bill "El Wingador" Simmons after watching Errol Morris' insanely great mini-documentary on the wing-eater on NYTimes.com. (Check it out here.) Sadly, El Wingador placed a distant third, having eaten just 251 wings. (It was, however, a PR for him.) I guess practicing swallowing a baseball-sized sphere of a hundred-plus Tootsie Rolls didn't pay off for Simmons.

Personally, I'm still waiting for this to happen at one of these events:

Why Are the Best Competitive Eaters Skinny?

Shouldn't the world's best competitive eaters be large and in charge? After all, they have the most room to fill with hot dogs, pies and chicken wings, right?

The answer: people with less abdominal fat can stretch their stomachs more.

As Popular Science put it, "[a] skinny man's stomach has little fat to push against it and fight the food for space."

Takeru Kobayashi hails from Japan and weighs 145 pounds, empty. [In 2003], he won the annual Fourth of July hot-dog-eating competition in Coney Island, New York, by scarfing down 44 hot dogs -- with buns -- in 12 minutes, averaging one every 16.4 seconds... Second place went to the 408-pound Edward Jarvis, who downed 30 1/2 hot dogs in the same amount of time. William "The Refrigerator" Perry, formerly of the Chicago Bears, managed only five.

So how does a man roughly a third the size of Jarvis outeat him by half? Answer, at least in part: The size of the stomach at rest is inconsequential. All that matters is the stomach's ability to expand, to adapt itself to the amount of food being shoved down the esophagus.

Belly fat inhibits rather than enhances your ability to pack it down.

(Source: Martin Berkhan)