Concepts in Competitive Eating

I really have no interest in competitive eating, but I have been watching some of the Travel Channel's "Man v. Food" lately and have a few ideas to freshen up the old formula of trying to cram as much food as possible into your belly in 15 minutes, or an hour, or whatever.1. Instead of seeing how many hot dogs you can eat in an hour, how about seeing how many hot dogs you can eat in a month? I would imagine this sort of "long distance" competitive eating would have a different set of techniques involved than the traditional "sprint" competition. The sprint is all about cramming things into your throat, but the month-long competition asks the question, "just how many hot dogs do you really want to eat?"

It goes without saying, of course, that this would also be really unhealthy, like "Super Size Me," only shooting for quantity as well. I'm trying to imagine who would participate... you'd have to be really bored, like maybe under house arrest or something.

2. If gorging yourself isn't your bag of tea, how about just an open-ended "consecutive" eating contest? The way this would work is that the winner would not be determined by the number of hot dogs eaten, but just how long one can go eating no food other than hot dogs. I suppose you could use lemonade to wash it down.

Obviously, this is unhealthy, also. How long would people go? A week? A month?

3. A variant on #2 above, how about instead of exclusively eating hot dogs, what about just requiring the consumption of at least one hot dog at each meal (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and then just seeing how long the competitors can do that.

This one wouldn't be all that unhealthy, at least compared to the typical American diet. This test would be more mental than anything else... I can imagine at some point you'd get sick to death of hot dogs, but if you held on through that phase, eventually you'd reach the level where you don't even notice you're eating hot dogs anymore. It'd be like breathing air or drinking water. This competition could go on for years.

Once again, I should note that I have no intention of trying any of these things. I'm just sharing the ideas that pop into my head.