Update: Randy Santel has been eating his way through DFW

Last week, I posted this story about Randy Santel, a competitive-eating guy from the Kansas City area who has been breezing (and probably burping) his way through DFW tackling eating challenges in Fort Worth, Denton, Dallas and Addison en route to competing in a National Barbecue Eating Challenge at Dickey's Barbecue Pit in Dallas this afternoon (as in Tuesday, Oct. 18).

Santel, 25, now has well over 70 challenges under his belt -- and before you make any jokes about what's hanging over his belt, you should know that the guy is a very fit-looking 6-foot-5, because when he's not eating, he's bodybuilding (he probably does other things, but let's just run with that, OK?). He's won every challenge he's tackled in DFW so far, including eating the 5-pound Yokozuna Burger meal at Frankie's Sports Bar in Dallas in 12 minutes.

I watched Pete MacGillis, who has appeared on Man vs. Food Nation, set the previous Yokozuna record of 25 minutes, and everyone was really impressed when that happened. I wasn't there when Santel cut the record in half, but I imagined that it involved something like unhinging his jaw and going after it like one of the creatures in Alien or something from The Waling Dead.

But, as it turns out, there is a method to Santel's madness, which I witnessed when he came fairly close to my neighborhood to do a challenge Sunday at Wild Bill's Grill in north Fort Worth. (Santel had this filmed for YouTube, but it doesn't appear to have been posted yet.) Santel ate a 3-pound, six-patty cheeseburger in eight minutes Sunday evening -- and that was after he conquered the Chubby's Challenge that afternoon at Chubby's Burger Shack in Fort Worth.

Although he doesn't eat like this all the time and doesn't generally cram (in many senses of the word) several challenges into a few-day period, I'm told that Santel did once do three challenges in one day (you can follow his progress in DFW and elsewhere on his Facebook page..

Before he took on the Wild Bill's challenge, I asked Santel a few questions.

How did you pick your DFW itinerary?

What I'm doing now, I video all my stuff. So if I pick big challenges, I can't do more than one a day. If I do smaller challenges, such as this [NOTE: Remember, he's talking about eating a 3-pound burger in less than 10 minutes], I'm able to do two challenges and get two wins to add to my list and have two videos to put up on YouTube, I mean, 71 smaller challenges sounds better than 30 big challenges. Most people think that Adam Richman is like a god of eating. But really, he's not that good; it's just all they know. [NOTE: Coincidentally, a story on Richman is posted on DFW.com as I write this.]

But even people from other parts of Texas think of DFW as just "Dallas." You've come up with an itinerary that covers several North Texas cities.

This is my 10th state, and it looks better -- at least I think it does -- to have all these different city names showing that I've been around and traveled and stuff, rather than just doing six Dallas challenges.

It sometimes seems like every sports bar has an eating challenge. How did you decide which ones you were going to do?

The site I use is called EatFeats.com. That's where I get 'em from. I used to get 'em from the Man vs. Food forums, but they took those down like a year ago. And it's starting to get to the point where people are e-mailing me about challenges, so that's good.

How long have you been doing this?

I've been doing it seriously since September of last year. I started in March 2010, I did my first one. I won a Men's Health National Body Championship. It was a two-month, really strict exercise and diet program. A week after finishing that, a buddy and I did a 28-inch, 12-pound pizza. We did it fairly easily and we won 500 bucks. So I started looking into all these other challenges. The second challenge I did, I was the first out of over 120 people to eat this 18-inch deep-dish pizza, and I got 450 bucks for that.

What does your doctor say about this?

Oh, I've been to the doctor a couple of times, but my cholesterol is low because I work out so much. The big thing is, you don't want to gain weight. I don't eat like this all the time, obviously. This seven in five days is a five days is a lot. I'm gonna take two weeks off and just eat a lot of vegetables, a lot of lean meats, and get my body back to what it was before, just lose all the calories I've gained. Usually I try to lift if I do a challenge back home. If I do it about two hours before eating time, I'll come in going, "Man, I'm hungry."

Have you ever considered doing your own TV show?

Adam Richman has a show not because he's a really good eater, but because he has a personality where he can talk to anybody. I'm still working on that. Like I can't just go up to somebody and start chatting away. But eventually I'd like to get to that spot. We'll see.

There's a lot more time left to do all that stuff. And once I get done with all this eating stuff, I'd like to turn to fitness. Because it's one thing to listen to somebody who's been fit all their life and blah blah blah [Santel used to weigh 350 pounds], but I'll be able to relate to people, and they'll be able to respect me because I'vel be able to eat this much and still maintain pretty good abs.