When I heard that Michael Phelps ate 12,000 calories a day, I could hardly believe it, so I looked it up and here it is in black and white from:
blogs.wsj.com/health
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 orthopedic 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.”
Hey, we can eat 12,000 calories a day also if we put out as much energy as Micheal Phelps. I don’t know about you, but 1200 calories a day is probably more than I put out even with my exercising. I looked at my stats today and found that I lifted incrementally a little over 13,000 pounds today, 39,000 pounds for the week – I took off Monday. While that sounds like a lot to me, it certainly doesn’t compare to the energy the Olympic athletes expend every day. I guess it all boils down to the same old equation – if you eat fewer calories than your expend you will reduce your weight – if you eat more, you expand your weight.
At this point in my weight program I don’t have to exercise strenuously or watch how many calories I eat, because I don’t overeat anymore. That’s the beauty of learning how to listen to your body, stop eating when you are satisfied and go do something else. It soon becomes a habit and I don’t even have to think about it now. Is that great, or what?
Think Thin Thoughts!
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Tags: athletes, calorie-incinerating, calories, eggs and cheese, energy, exercise, French toast, grits, listen, muscles, Olympic, pancakes, pasta, pizza, powdered sugar, reduce, replenish, satisfied, strenuously
