[Vision2020] Michael Phelps 12,000 calorie (a day) diet.

[Carl Westberg]

A typical Michael Phelps daily menu....  Carl Westberg Jr.         The Michael Phelps Diet: Don’t Try It at Home
 


Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating.
Besides grabbing six gold medals at the Beijing Olympics so far,
making him the winningest Olympic athlete ever, he’s got to be setting
new marks on the chow line.
 
 A New York Post account of
Phelps’s… wait for it… 12,000-calorie-a-day diet, gave us a
stomachache. Could one human being really consume that much and still
be in Phelps’s shape? And could this possibly be healthy for Phelps,
even considering his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week exercise regimen?
 
 Here’s Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t choose among these options. He eats them all, according to the Post.)
 

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce,
tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg
omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with
powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
 
 Lunch: One
pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo
on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories. 
 
 Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks. 
 

Does a diet like this make sense even for a calorie-incinerating human
swimming machine? We checked in with Mark Klion, a sports medicine doc
and orthopaedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He
reminded us that the eating game all comes down to basic math. 
 

If you eat fewer calories than you burn exercising, you lose weight.
But an athlete like Phelps, who exercises up a storm, has to worry
about eating enough to replenish the scads of calories he’s burned. If
he doesn’t, Klion explains, his “body won’t recover, the muscles will
not recover, there will not be adequate energy stored for him to
compete in his next event.”
 
 But what about the choice of
foods? All those eggs and ham and cheese can’t possibly be good for
him, can they? Says Klion, “I think for him, because of his caloric
demands, he can probably eat whatever he wants to.” And besides, Klion
says, if you’ve got to eat that much, it better be enjoyable, or you
won’t be able to keep up. Phelps might not be so eager to shovel down a
pound of tofu in a sitting, Klion points out.
 
 Still, Klion
cautions that he knows plenty of athletes who’ve been training for
marathons and have gained weight because they thought they could eat
whatever they wanted. So it really does take some planning. Some
resources on the Web might help, such as this calorie-use chart from
the American Heart Association and a calorie calculator from Runner’s
World magazine. This calculator from the Calorie Control Council
includes a bunch of different activities, from dusting to playing ice
hockey.
 
 But these kinds of calculators don’t really apply to a
someone like Phelps, who exercises way more vigorously than the typical
person, says Kathleen Laquale, an athletic trainer and nutritionist who
teaches at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Even by athletic
standards, Phelps is in his own league. Laquale says cyclists in the
Tour de France commonly consume a paltry 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day.
     http://blogs.wsj.com/health/20....ry-it-at-home/
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