Win Before You Begin!! This is the official motto of FoodChallenges.com when teaching people how to win eating challenges and contests. It is adapted from some of the teachings found in the book The Art Of War by Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese military general and strategist. In the book, Sun Tzu states, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” He also says, “The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.” These two simple quotes explain the full meaning of Win Before You Begin. You need to win your food challenge before it even gets placed on your table in front of you, and you do that by following the three parts (you must do all 3) of Win Before You Begin. You must TRAIN, STRATEGIZE, and DOMINATE!! Before continuing below, please check out our video that explains the meaning of all three aspects of our ultimate mindset:

The Three Aspects of Win Before You Begin

Train – As stated throughout many of our articles, you cannot just wake up one day and decide to attempt a food challenge. It takes a lot of effort, training, and hard work to fully prepare yourself for a large eating challenge. If you can win easily without any training, it cannot really be considered a real challenge for you. You need to prepare your body for the food challenge by training to increase your stomach capacity. Do this by using the articles featured in our Stomach Capacity Training section. There are even articles to help you increase your jaw strength and endurance, and to help you train yourself so that you can eat food faster. If you do not train your stomach to be able to hold all of the food, your strategy and mindset will not matter, and you will surely lose.

Strategize – As also stated throughout many of our articles, you cannot just pick up a 5 lb burger and start eating, hoping that you will win. Before you even get to the restaurant, you need to plan out the strategy and technique that you will use to break down and consume each component of the challenge so that you can finish the entire meal before the time limit expires. You should know the order that you will consume each part of the challenge so that you can continually move from one component to the next without any hesitation. There are over 28 different types of food challenges around the world and each type involves its own basic strategy. You cannot attempt to eat that 5 lb burger with the same strategy you would use to eat a 6 lb bowl of pasta or 18 scoop ice cream sundae. Be sure to check out all of the articles in our During The Challenge section, and you definitely need to check out the article and video pertaining to the particular challenge type that you will be attempting. Those articles can be found in our Strategies Per Challenge Type section. Designing the perfect strategy can take some extra effort, especially if this will be your first or second challenge, but you will definitely be happy that you did once you begin eating. Your confidence level will be through the roof!!

Dominate – If you have trained properly and developed a solid strategy that you will use during the challenge, you have done everything that you can do, so now you need to make sure you are confident that you will win. As soon as you see the challenge coming out to your table, you need to already be visualizing the victory. There have been many times where the challenge has been placed in front of me, and then someone asks me if I think I will finish it. If I am on a trip in a new area where I don’t know anybody, I typically respond “I did not come all this way to lose.” If the people watching already know who I am, I usually smile and respond “this challenge is over before they even start the timer.” I know that my stomach is ready and that I have a solid strategy put together based on years of experience, and therefore I have no doubt that I will dominate the challenge. You need to have this mindset during your challenge. Know that you are not just going to win, but you are going to leave no doubt, and dominate the meal in record time. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right. Don’t think you are going to win. Know that you are going to dominate, and that is what you will do!!

You must involve all three aspects if you really want to defeat your challenge, and you cannot just include two of them, especially the first two. If you only train without putting together your plan of attack, and if you only strategize without doing any significant training, you can only have “false hope” at most which is not true confidence. If you make sure to include all three aspects into your challenge preparations, you will be able to “put yourself beyond the possibility of defeat” so that there is no question whether you will win or lose. You are definitely going to dominate!! Win Before You Begin, and you will be a very successful competitive eater.

Thanks for reading The Ultimate Mindset: Win Before You Begin and using FoodChallenges.com!!

To go back and view other Before The Challenge articles, click here.