The 24 hours before your eating competition are definitely the most critical hours of your training period. If you don’t take these hours seriously, your body will not be at peak performance during your challenge or contest. Before you read this article, please make sure that you have read and understand How To Expand Your Stomach Using Food, How To Expand Your Stomach Using Water, Expanding Your Stomach Using Food AND Water, and even read A 48 Hour Stomach Crash Training Plan. Since you will be following plans similar to these, and they all lead up to this critical 24 hour period before the competition starts, you will understand this article better if you read them first. You’ll be using the results of your past training days to plan out this period. Now let’s get into the real “meat and potatoes” of what you need to do to prepare for your challenge so that you can DOMINATE!!

The Very Important Max Out Meal

As mentioned in all of the other training articles, the max out meal needs to happen 18 to 22 hours before your eating competition. Since you already Set The Challenge Time And Date and Confirmed The Details With The Restaurant, you already know what that window of time is. It is not the end of the world if you do it 24 hours beforehand or 16 hour beforehand, but know that 18 to 22 hours is optimal. This will be the last meal of solid foods that you have, and the main goal is to expand your stomach as far as possible, and then allow enough time for all of that food to be “eliminated” from your body before the competition. You want your body to be empty and ready to be filled back up again during the challenge. If you eat your max out meal only 16 hours in advance, this really doesn’t allow your body much time to get rid of everything. This could cause you to fill up quicker during the challenge since there will still be a good portion of your max out meal sitting in your lower digestive organs. At the same time though, you don’t want your body to be completely starving. You will have more calories before the event (mentioned later) but those won’t be from solid foods. If your body is used to solid foods, then it could get really hungry if you go 24 hours or more without eating solid foods. For your first time, stick to the 18 to 22 hour window & then after that you can venture out if you deem it personally necessary.

As mentioned in the other training articles, your max out meal needs to consist of mostly easily digestible vegetables and fruits such as the ones listed in Lower Calorie Stomach Training Foods. Even if you are a hardgainer that has a very high metabolism, that does not mean that the actual food will process and “leave” quicker than other people’s bodies. Eating vegetables and fruits that are high in both fiber and water will help make sure that the food has all been “eliminated” before you start eating. You may also want to take some type of fiber supplement or laxative to help make sure that “elimination” happens in time. For tips on that, please read some of the articles in the After The Challenge section. In case you are on a budget, feel free to read Stomach Capacity Training On A Budget which has some good ideas for having a cheap max out meal. Eat as much food as you can, and it is not a big deal if it takes an hour to do it. You want to expand your stomach as much as possible. Once you know that you are at your max and can’t eat anymore, stop because you don’t want to get sick. After allowing a few minutes to let the food settle, drink water until you can feel your stomach stretch. Don’t get out of control though, because you don’t want to hurt yourself. After doing this, you are now done with solid foods until eating competition time. Your next non-solid meal will take place in the morning.

The Rest Of The Night Before The Competition

After having a meal that big, you won’t be able to get to sleep because your body is working hard to digest all the food you just ate. After an hour of letting your food digest, you want to start drinking water which will help your body process and metabolize the food faster and more efficiently. You don’t need to chug water or drink a lot at a time. Just drink it steadily, and quit an hour or two before bedtime. Please be aware that since you just ate food full of water, and you were drinking water to help the food digest, you may have to get up a few times to go to the bathroom. Since this is your first or one of your first challenges, please don’t attempt to go out partying the night before your challenge after the max out meal. I did it multiple times when I was younger and I definitely noticed a significant decrease in performance when doing challenges after drinking the night before, compared to challenges that I completed after a good night’s sleep. Get a good night sleep so that your body is well-rested and ready to go the next day. You want to be feeling strong when you take that first delicious bite!!

The Day Of The Challenge (Game Day!!)

If your challenge is real early in the morning, please make sure to read Preparing For An Early Morning Challenge. For the purpose of this article, we will base the schedule on a challenge time between 2pm and 5pm. The earlier your challenge is, the earlier you want to get up. If your challenge is at 12pm, you may want to consider getting up between 6am and 7am, and no later than 8am. If your challenge is later in the day, you definitely have the option to sleep in if you don’t have any productive things to do. When you wake up, drink 16 to 20 ounces of water just to wake your body up. An hour later after getting out of bed, go ahead and drink a protein shake, meal replacement shake, yogurt, or some other type of non-solid breakfast. You don’t want anything solid because that will affect your eating performance during the competition. After drinking your breakfast, you have the option to have one last small liquid stomach stretch. If you were drinking water all throughout the week, you may want to try one last stomach stretch with a low calorie sports drink or water mixed with a “mixer” containing electrolytes. If you have four or five hours left before the contest, drink an amount of liquid that you feel comfortable drinking, based on how your training went earlier that week. You know your body better than I do, and everybody is different, which is why I am not giving a certain required amount. Just make sure to be careful and that you are not drinking just water. Only do the optional stomach stretch if you had a non-solid breakfast to go along with it too. This will be the last bit of liquid you drink.

Let’s say the contest is at 3pm, and that you did the last stomach stretching exercise at 10am so that you have five hours to let the water “leave your body” along with the remaining food from your max out meal. Around 12pm (noon) you may want to get some exercise or some type of workout in so that your body is even more hungry and ready to eat the big meal. Click to find out Why You Should Exercise Before The Competition.

If you have an event later in the day, at 7pm for example, you want to approach the day a little differently. Have the max out meal the night before for dinner, just like normal, and still make sure to drink water and get a good night’s rest. Since your competition is so late in the day, you will want to eat a lighter solid breakfast. You don’t want to have a big stack of pancakes or anything like that, but have some eggs, oatmeal, and other foods early that morning. If you go all day without any solid foods, your body may not feel as energized during the contest, and you definitely don’t want to feel weak. The light breakfast will help keep your body regulated and it won’t affect your performance since the contest is in the evening. Then have your protein shake and stomach stretch in the afternoon. Using 7pm as the example time, you would want to do that around 2pm, which is plenty of time after your small breakfast. Then workout around 4-5 pm, and you will be ready to dominate your competition!!

Hopefully it has been understood that this article pertains to people preparing for quantity challenges, and not small super spicy challenges. You don’t need to have any kind of real stomach capacity to finish 12 spicy chicken wings, which is why small spicy challenges are only 1 star in our system. Make sure that you have that max out meal and that you are drinking water too, and don’t believe the common misconception that you should fast for a long time before challenges. Feel free to read the Reasons Why Starving Yourself Does Not Work.

Thanks for reading about the 24 hours before your eating competition and using FoodChallenges.com!!

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