Michael Phelps’s Beijing success is, in part, down to his 12,000 calorie diet. Here’s how you, too, can maintain, and lose, weight
In the aftermath of the Olympics, we are left to reflect on the dramatic performance of some of the world’s greatest athletes. Usain Bolt improved on his previous world-best performance to remain the fastest man on the planet while many Irish athletes are going back to the drawing board.
One in particular who has left his mark on this year’s Beijing Olympics is undoubtedly US swimmer Michael Phelps.
Eight Olympic gold medals in Beijing and seven world records are nothing to be sniffed at. It is not only his results that are making a splash, but also his reported 12,000 calorie diet.
The average male Phelps’ age (23) would be advised to eat about 2,000-3,000 calories a day. That means he is eating six times the calorie intake for the average male. We must first understand, though, that activities, muscle mass and metabolism are never taken into account by this government’s average calorie intake.
The RDA (recommended daily allowance) for someone is based on the average healthy person. When nearly 40pc of the population are either overweight or obese, the average healthy person really is in a minority.
What people want to know is why someone as lean as Michael Phelps has not developed into a whale instead of a fish. We already know Phelps is super quick in the water, with speeds that many humans would be proud of on land.
The majority of people reading his diet do not realise the energy required to run a super-human machine such as Michael Phelps. When you see what he is eating for breakfast, you may feel a little malnourished. Three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions, and mayo, one five-egg omelette, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast with powdered sugar, three chocolate chip pancakes and two cups of coffee.
As someone who preaches fresh, healthy food to his clients, I am receiving a bit of a bashing, as you can’t argue with Phelps’ results. They want to know why the hell he looks and performs as good as he does on that kind of diet.
It all comes down to consumption and expenditure. The guy may eat like a vacuum cleaner, sucking down every fast-absorbing carbohydrate and fat in sight, yet he trains like a demon or a fuel-guzzling Ferrari.
Between competing and warm-up and cool-down lengths for his races, he will have travelled more than 38 miles this week in the water. That is more than I cover in a week… in a car!
He simply expends as much energy as he consumes, and that keeps his weight constant. I heard him say in an interview that he can’t seem to break 200lbs, even though he stands 6’4″.
So what happens after the Olympics are over, and his training stops? There is also a simple answer to that.
If Phelps continued to consume at his current rate and ceased all physical activity he would, in all likelihood, blow up. This is easily visible when you see former school rugby players who move on to college and then jobs and then get to reminisce about the Senior Cup year from their barstool.
The classic V-taper of wide shoulders and a narrow waist they once had has now been turned upside down. They have stopped burning off the energy from playing, but they are still consuming the same amount of food.
To maintain weight, expenditure must equal consumption. To lose weight expenditure has to exceed consumption. It looks pretty simple on paper, anyway.
In truth, I don’t think Phelps will ever have a big problem for a few crucial reasons: his massive volume of training will mean that his normal metabolism is probably really high. He will, of course, reduce his calorie intake when he reduces his training load, which will balance itself out.
If you want to lose weight, you need to move more and eat less. It’s that simple but as I said earlier, when placed into our real world and everyday lives, it can be difficult to put into practice.
You can either learn to deal with it, adapt and make choices conducive to the way you want to look, or end up looking like a beached whale instead of a sleek fish.
The other slightly less practical option is to swim and workout for six-plus hours a day, every day of the week, from a very young age.
Who knows, you might mange to win a few medals for Ireland while you’re at it!
Personally, I think I’ll stick to training in under the hour, working at a high intensity, challenging my mind and my body and watching what I eat 90pc of the time, and eat like Phelps 10pc of the time.
That works for me. The question remains: what works for you? Or maybe a better question is: what is not working for you?
