Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating. Besides grabbing five 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 chooseamong 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.”
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 thiscalorie-use chart from the American Heart Association and
a calorie calculator fromRunner’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.
By Sarah Rubenstein
Source:WSJ
No comments:
Post a Comment