What, no veggies or fruit? Just protein sugar and carbs?
I know that diet example can’t be every day’s menu but come on. You’d think a professional athlete would at least drink a V-8 or shovel in a minimum of fruits and veggies in a given day. What gives?
Fruits and vegetables have a very low caloric density. If you’re trying to pack in 12,000 calories a day, because you are burning that many calories a day, you don’t really have room for a lot of bulk with minimal energy - your stomach wouldn’t be able to hold it all. I would assume he takes multi-vitamins and maybe fiber supplements.
It’s so we can all hate him even more.
He also swims for hours a day and trains pretty much non-stop. He needs all the calories he can get.
When my husband was in high school his wrestling and football coach urged the players to eat 4000 calories a day.
Considering Phelps is swimming 17 times over nine days, he probably has to eat that much just to function at his peak.
It’s not junk food…lots of carbs and protein and energy drinks. I’m sure he’d sick of shoveling all that food in.
This is what Michael Phelps eats for breakfast.
It’s funny you should say that. I was explaining caloric density to a friend who wanted some advice and was trying to explain how anything made from grains/cereals/rice was about 7 or 8 times the caloric density of fruit and vegetables. As a comparison I used potatoes as he been advised to avoid them. I said 100 gm of rice or cereal or bread or pasta would contain about 350 - 400 calories but 100 gm of potatoes would contain 70 calories and other vegetables, on average, about 50.
So on that basis if Phelps was a vegetarian he would need to eat 24 kilos (52.8 pounds) of vegetables a day to get his 12,000 calories.
I love the shock people get when I get them to compare the calories per 100 gm for crackers and sweet cookies and they find that the difference is negligible.