They were competitive eaters. Then they fell in love

Randy Santel and Katina DeJarnett are in love: with each other, and with eating 10lbs of pizza in under an hour
Image may contain Clothing Apparel Food Dessert Chocolate Confectionery Sweets Icing Cake Creme Cream and Team
Getty Images / WIRED

RANDY SANTEL DIDN'T really develop feelings for Katina DeJarnett until he saw her scoff down King Crab legs, salmon pizza, shrimp, calamari, seafood tacos, a Cobb sandwich, halibut, fries, onion rings, and chowder in one hour, 36 minutes, and 40 seconds.

It was July 2020 and the two professional eaters were road-tripping around Alaska to undertake five food challenges in ten days: a 40-inch pizza in Nenana; reindeer meat, six eggs, plus a 1.5lb cinnamon roll in Anchorage; $300 (£215) worth of BBQ in Sterling – not to mention the seafood and beef burgers. Though they’d never met before the trip, Santel – a 35-year-old with over 11 years of competitive eating under his belt – and 29-year-old former bodybuilder DeJarnett were becoming fast friends.

There was “a little bit of flirting” in the early days of the trip – and, to save money, the pair shared hotel rooms with twin beds. But then DeJarnett lost the very first food challenge they did together, leaving a small tray of disco fries behind. “I’m the kind of person where I’m willing to get sick if I have an opportunity to win, and I kind of felt like she quit early,” Santel says. It had been eight years since his last relationship.

Santel started competitive eating in 2010 after he won a Men’s Health body transformation contest and celebrated by undertaking a 28-inch pizza challenge with a friend. (Professional eaters, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, eat masses of food in the fastest time possible, competing against others or the clock.)

“I was still a little bit hungry even after eating like three kilos of pizza, so I went and had ice cream,” he explains via Zoom in mid-June. His cousin took a camera to the challenge and Santel uploaded the footage to YouTube, earning “a couple hundred views.” He enjoyed the experience (and the $500 prize money) so much that he began travelling the globe to seek out other challenges.

In 2015, Santel had his first major media interview – with Vice’s food vertical Munchies – in which he was candid about his lifestyle. “In order to go anywhere I need to go, do anything I need to do, there can’t be any type of serious relationship involved,” he said. “I spend a lot of time alone, which kind of sucks.”

Still, time alone meant more time to spend on his passion project: FoodChallenges.com, launched in 2014 as the go-to site for professional eaters to find upcoming challenges and read advice from Santel. While competitive eating has been traced back to 1878 – when the first pie-eating contest took place in Toronto – restaurant challenges like the ones Santel undertakes boomed in the 2010s thanks to the Adam Richman show Man v. Food. Around the same time, competitive eaters started to gain traction on YouTube – Santel hit 100,000 subscribers in June 2015.

Today, Santel has 1.3 million YouTube and 1.4 million Facebook subscribers that follow his every bite. During his Munchies interview, he discussed how “at the end of every day, I’m really, really broke.” Nowadays, even if a video flops, finances aren’t “a stressor” – he is monetised on Facebook and YouTube and nets an additional £7,000 a year on Patreon.

In May, he won his thousandth food challenge. There are five 45-gallon plastic tubs in Santel’s parent’s home filled with t-shirts: each marks a challenge that he has won. They’re emblazoned with restaurant logos and addresses and the occasional slogan such as, “I’m a big fat BA$T@RD! I can’t believe I ate the WHOLE THING!”. (Santel is currently starting his sixth tub.)

He has perfected his stomach capacity training and eating technique over the years; on the tips section of his website, Santel has written numerous articles with titles such as, “Use mind games to trick yourself to victory”, “Sitting vs standing vs kneeling while eating”, and “What to eat first: proteins vs carbohydrates”.

Early last year, Randy Santel seemed to have it all: adoring fans, tubs of t-shirts, prize money, YouTube revenue, his own line of merchandise, not to mention all he could eat. But one thing was missing.

WHILE RANDY SANTEL was eating his way around the world, Katina DeJarnett was in the military, and bodybuilding professionally. When she was “super hungry” during bodybuilding competitions, she would live vicariously through professional eating videos she found online. In April 2019, she became disillusioned after finishing a bodybuilding competition – “I felt really small next to the other girls…We’ll just say that they weren’t tested, it was an untested thing” – and decided she wanted to gain some weight.

When watching eating videos, DeJarnett had always secretly thought “I could do that” – and so she did. She rebranded her pre-existing social media pages from “Katina Lifts Kilos” to “Katina Eats Kilos” and filmed herself eating 10,000 calories worth of donuts and one gallon of jelly (among other things). She first connected with Santel in June 2019 when she completed a challenge he set for his audience and he DM’d her to send her a prize (a t-shirt, of course). After that, she would occasionally comment on his live streams.

And so, when an Alaskan restaurant invited Santel to undertake its pizza challenge with a partner, he messaged DeJarnett. “I thought about all my friends and either I wouldn’t want to spend 10 days with them or they had real jobs that their boss would never let them off for 10 days,” he says. “Katina stood out as someone who always seemed fun, always positive.” For DeJarnett, saying yes was a no-brainer: “He was my hee-eero!” she says in a mock sing-song voice.

In the beginning, Santel’s motivations were decidedly unromantic. “She had a viral video at the time of her doing a steak challenge,” he explains, “And also, too, she’s a really pretty, small girl, a really pretty blonde… I figured having her in the videos not only would be a fun time, but it’d also help my videos get views.” Santel had previously filmed a video with UK competitor Kate Ovens that performed well “because there’s a giant height and weight difference” between the pair.

Almost immediately, Santel and DeJarnett hit it off (and then she went and spoiled it all by doing something stupid like leaving a tray of disco fries). But when DeJarnett redeemed herself during the seafood challenge a day later, Santel’s feelings changed.

“There was nothing but determination. She wanted our team to win,” he says, “And so I think that’s kind of when I initially was like, ‘Oh, wow. I really like this girl.’” Three days later – after devouring a 10lb pizza in 45 minutes – the pair kissed for the first time.

Santel and DeJarnett have been dating for the best part of the last year and have just bought a house together in Milwaukee. They aren’t the world’s first competitive eating couple – that honour belongs to Nevadans Rich and Carlene LeFevre, both in their seventies – but they are arguably the most accomplished. DeJarnett adds to Santel’s social following with 387,000 subscribers across Facebook and YouTube. “People call us a power couple, but I don’t really use that term too much,” Santel says.

DeJarnett is now a full time professional eater – but her grandparents are “still not entirely supportive” of her career because of their concerns about what she’s doing to her body. Just how unhealthy is a decade of competitive eating? How sustainable is the couple’s lifestyle? How dangerous? How romantic? Is love the only thing making their hearts beat faster?

WITHIN A FEW days of meeting, Santel and DeJarnett saw the best and worst of each other. “Sharing a room at the end of the day after a food challenge, you hear bodily function noises,” DeJarnett says. “Going through a challenge you experience the pain and then you experience the high of winning… Between the hours in the car and all the chatting, and then the victories and successes and then the pain and suffering together, that’s like the quickest way to bond.”

The morning after a food challenge, DeJarnett wakes up with a swollen face, fingers, and ankles. Santel doesn’t suffer as long – he says his body is used to it – but when I garble a question about poop, assuming this is the worst part of a post-challenge comedown, he’s quick to correct me.

“It’s the sodium,” he says, “We’ll have ten grams of sodium and you won’t pee for the rest of the night.” (Santel also consumes a lot of soda – the acidity helps break up carbs like bread and fries while doing a challenge, plus it helps him get rid of gas. “Doing a food challenge is like Tetris in your stomach,” he explains.)

According to a 2018 article in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association, the “perils” of professional eating are manifold. The article’s authors claim that competitive eaters “are at risk of gastroparesis, aspiration pneumonia, gastric perforation, Mallory-Weiss tear, Boerhaave syndrome, and morbid obesity.” To put it another way – as the authors did – such eaters “continue to test the limits of human health.” Over the years, a number of competitive eaters have choked to death: most recently in January 2020, an Australian woman had a seizure after some cake obstructed her windpipe.

There have been times when the couple have worried about their health: DeJarnett says some spicy wings she consumed “burned in my stomach for probably a week and a half” after one challenge, while Santel says, “there’s definitely times where I just feel like hell”, especially when he finishes eating and has to take photographs with fans instead of lying down for a nap. While Santel and DeJarnett’s work can affect their own wellbeing, it keeps the restaurant industry healthy: Santel says many establishments experience a “big influx” of customers after he posts a video.

Still, the couple argue that because of their exercise and nutrition backgrounds (he’s a dietetics graduate, she has a kinesiology degree) they’re well-equipped to look after themselves. “When I’m not doing a challenge, I focus a lot on getting lean protein, a lot of leafy green vegetables and keeping my calories super low so that when I do have the crazy high calorie days it all kind of balances out,” DeJarnett explains. The pair cycle together and Santel rides his spin bike for an hour and a half every day. Both get “semi-annual bloodwork” to ensure they remain in good health.

But they still gain weight. When touring, Santel does multiple challenges back to back and has little time to exercise. “I’ve done 75 challenges in 78 days,” he says, referring to a 2015 tour of the eastern United States. DeJarnett is just 5ft 2 – 15 inches shorter than Santel – which can cause difficulties when she tries to keep up. While she used to film a lot of videos at home, eating a large amount of food across a whole day, she now regularly joins Santel during speed-eating restaurant challenges. In February and March 2021, the couple toured around Florida eating pizza, steak, and burgers.

“Coming off the Florida tour that we did – where there was two months in a row of basically constantly eating and not being able to exercise – I put on a fair amount of weight,” DeJarnett says. “And people on the internet are not shy about letting you know.”

Much of the tabloid coverage DeJarnett has received focuses on her physique: the Mail Online ran bikini pics while praising her “svelte figure” while in 2020, Metro emphasised that “she still weighs nine stone and wears a UK size six.” DeJarnett admits she feels pressure to maintain her image.

“Part of my vibe is I’m supposed to be this fitness-centric girl that eats all this food while still maintaining slimness. After Florida when I didn’t fit that bill anymore, the comments got more negative and the views did start to go down.”

Santel says hate comments are “worse when we’re fat” (though he clarifies DeJarnett is “not really fat”, just “her version” of it). “When I’m bigger I get a lot of comments about, ‘Oh, do you not care about your health? You’re gonna get a heart attack. You’re about to pop. You’re about to explode.’” Most of the time, Santel brushes these away knowing that he’ll slim down again post-tour. “It’s by no means healthy,” he says of his professional eating, “but I don’t tell people that it is.”

In one way, weight gain is a sign that Santel and DeJarnett are doing something right. Santel emphasises that they’re both “ethical” eaters – by which he means they don’t deliberately throw up their food after eating, nor do they deceptively edit videos.

“People comment, ‘How are all these other people staying skinny and Randy’s sitting here getting so big?’” Santel says. “It does no good to call out anybody, so I just usually respond, ‘Hey, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.’”

Santel and DeJarnett’s integrity comes at a cost: not only do they visibly gain weight, they sometimes can’t produce content as big or as bold as their competitors. “I don’t think people understand that if you’re truly doing a 20,000 calorie challenge, it’s super, super painful. Or even if you can truly do that, if it’s humanly possible,” DeJarnett says.

Beyond concerns about the couple’s health, there’s one question I can’t get out of my mind when watching them eat. Do they actually enjoy the food?

“You can pick your favourite food in the whole wide world and when you get to a certain point of eating it, you’re going to wish that you never tasted that food again,” DeJarnett says (this is nicknamed “flavour fatigue” on the circuit). Sometimes, she complains, it can take so long for Santel to set up his camera and get his shots that the food has gone cold by the time the pair start to eat.

If a restaurant’s food is bad, both simply suck it up (though DeJarnett will no longer do challenges featuring blue cheese after experiencing a bout of food poisoning). “I originally thought that I would get to a point where I didn’t eat fries anymore,” Santel says. “But I always love fries.”

KATINA DEJARNETT HAS still never thrown up during a food challenge. Santel tells me this in an incredulous, slightly pointed, “Isn’t that funny!” sort of tone (he keeps a trash can by his side during every challenge in case he feels the urge to barf). DeJarnett explains: “I’m not willing to upchuck in front of people… Not necessarily because it would be embarrassing for me. But [out of consideration for] the people watching.”

The people watching are mostly men – 75 per cent of total viewers in Santel’s case; 60 per cent in DeJarnett’s – and span all ages. Santel lights up when describing how parents of picky or slow eaters will play his videos while their kids eat: “For some people, I’ve heard that it cuts mealtimes from an hour down to like 20 minutes.” On the other end of the spectrum, one woman recently chose to spend her seventieth birthday at one of Santel’s challenges in St. Cloud, Florida.

These viewers love DeJarnett and Santel’s relationship. When he first started posting videos from the Alaska trip, commenters immediately encouraged romance: “I see a relationship on the way... Ol Randy got himself a hottie!” (57 likes), and “Randy... Marry that young lady” (51 likes). “We were getting wedding cake comments: ‘Could you imagine the Wedding Cake Challenge?’,” Santel says. “We had so many people say, ‘Oh, I’m shipping you’ and neither of us knew what that meant.” (It’s a fan term for hoping two people end up together.)

Now they’re shipped, the pair aren’t shy about discussing how their relationship entwines with their careers. After DeJarnett describes their “first smoo-ooch”, Santel adds: “And then the next morning, she asked me if I could start sharing her Facebook videos.” Santel’s most popular video of all time is about restaurants that tried to cheat him out of a win. “People like drama. We say if we’re low on views or something, we need to have a fake fight,” he jokes.

But the couple’s viewers aren’t just hungry for love. Over lockdown, Santel says more and more people began making eating videos, increasing competition, while DeJarnett says YouTube’s algorithm and audience have an insatiable appetite. “If I do a 10,000 daily calorie challenge, people are gonna be like, ‘We’ve seen that before. Why don’t you do 12,000? 15,000? Why haven’t you done your 20,000 calorie challenge yet’?” she says.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the pair say it is dealing with this kind of social media fame – not the actual act of competitive eating – that is their biggest bonding experience. “I have someone to share everything with who kind of understands my lifestyle. People who have normal jobs don’t really understand the lifestyle of an ‘influencer’ or social media person,” Santel says. DeJarnett concurs: “You have to understand the lifestyle and how much time it takes to edit. Editing is like 90 per cent of it.”

And yet despite the demands of the job and the dangers to the couple’s health, both Santel and DeJarnett consider their career and relationship a dream come true. “There’s nothing I would rather be doing,” DeJarnett says.

“I often laugh when fans comment that they are glad I’m finally ‘happy’ now that Katina and I are together and I’ve met someone,” Santel adds. “I was happy alone because I’ve always worked nonstop on my goals.

“My first job was in construction,” he explains. “Within a year, I knew that I didn’t really love it. I used to ask people, ‘Hey, if everybody in the world made 30 bucks an hour, no matter what they did, no more, no less, what would you do? I would say exactly what I’m doing now.”

Santel is starting a dietetics internship in August – before that, he’s hoping to take 20 weeks off the eating circuit and lose 100lbs. When he finishes his studies, he plans to expand his nutrition, fitness, and weight management content and become “the number one followed dietitian in the world”. But competitive eating is still very much on the menu – Santel has won challenges in 37 countries and the couple hope to travel together next year so he can reach his goal of 50.

“I’ve got a book coming out, a website, and a whole bunch of other stuff like that. So I’m gonna be doing food challenges until I can stop. It’s all gotta get paid for,” Santel says. When he won his 1,000th challenge in May, it “was a pretty cool thing” but by no means his end goal. “The next day I did 1,001.”

More great stories from WIRED

This article was originally published by WIRED UK