Consumed with winning

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She stands 5-foot-5 and carries all of 99 pounds. She is a waif, a featherweight with spindly arms who looks like a fat-free delicacy next to her hefty competition.

Don't be fooled by the frail frame, disarming smile, girlish giggle or -- and especially not this -- the shrunken stomach. Sonya Thomas can gnaw, gobble and gorge with the biggest and fastest eaters in the world.

The Alexandria resident is the top-ranked American on the international competitive eating circuit. The 38-year-old "gurgitator," as professional eaters are called, broke her own world record last week by downing 11.3 pounds of lobster -- the equivalent of 44 of the crustaceans -- in 12 minutes at the World Lobster Eating Festival in Kennebunkport, Maine.

According to the International Federation of Competitive Eating -- yes, such a thing exists -- she holds 17 world records. Her grand gorges range from baked beans (8.4 pounds in 2 minutes, 47 seconds) to hard-boiled eggs (65 in 6:40), oysters (552, or 46 dozen, in 10 minutes) and cheesecake (11 pounds in nine minutes).

"I don't get sick," she said, although she admits that digesting more than 10 percent of her body weight in cheesecake can cause some problems. "Only sometimes from different kinds of food. Sometimes with hard food that hurts your mouth. Like popcorn really hurt my mouth. I couldn't lift my tongue. My lips had blisters. It was horrible."

In competition, Miss Thomas defeats men three and four times her size, top power gurgitators such as 420-pound Eric "Badlands" Booker and 407-pound Ed "Cookie" Jarvis.

This queen of consumption is one of the few females on the circuit, a fact that causes some resentment among the large, macho men she discards in competition like so many chicken bones.

The rules are simple: swallow as much as food as you can in the allotted time and keep the food down. A regurgitation -- a "reversal of fortune" in the terminology of competitive eating -- results in a distasteful disqualification.

"I have always done everything fast," said Miss Thomas, who grew up in South Korea and moved to the United States 10 years ago. "That's why I think I am good at competitive eating; it is fast eating, speed eating. It is part of my personality."

Her fast metabolism was an untapped resource until she watched the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on television July 4, 2002. Miss Thomas instantly got the bite bug.