Matt Stonie is a competitive eater by trade, with a stunning list of accomplishments under his, um, belt. A few statistics: 84 slices of pumpkin pie in eight minutes; 345 dumplings in 10 minutes; 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes (winning him last year’s Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest). All told, he holds a dozen world records for eating. Oh, and he’s 5’8” and 130 lbs with a 28” waist. This means that when he consumed 10 pounds of pasta in eight minutes, he ate 1/13th of his body weight…in eight minutes.

That sounds painful. And Stonie admits that it used to be. “My first years of eating competitively were miserable. I was dehydrated, bloated, all that stuff. After a few years, I perfected my regimen,” he says. “Now I know exactly what to do—when to work out, what my diet should look like, how much liquid to drink.”

When we visited him in California, we asked him about his regimen and how he got into this line of work, and begged him to give us a little demonstration. He found a tray of jumbo hot dogs and happily obliged. Then we went back to his home, filled his bathtub with spaghetti, and beseeched him to climb in. We did not ask him to eat his way out—though we have no doubt that he could.

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagram