The Breakfast of Champions
Michael Phelps, last remaining bastion of American hegemony, apparently eats 12,000 calories a day:
Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase “Breakfast of Champions” by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.
He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.
At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread – capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.
For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs – what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen – with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza.
The story is written in such a way as to make it seem as if he eats this exact same set of meals every day, but it seems to me that if you’re in a position to eat so much you ought to take advantage of the situation and incorporate more variety.
58 Responses to “The Breakfast of Champions”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 13th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Either Phelps has one hell of a metabolism or 12000 is a bit of an exaggeration. I know weightlifters who would love to be able to eat 12000 calories.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Yeah, why not add some variety. On Tuesday, Phelps eats an entire pod of bowhead whales. On Friday, he eats most of Manhattan south of 34th St.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Actually come to think of it I have no idea what the caloric expenditure of competitive swimming is like, so maybe they all eat in all of their non-swimming waking hours.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
It’s the tragedy of operating in massive quantities. Like with McDonalds, the distribution chain for acquiring such vast amounts of food necessitate necessitate homogenization. Michael Phelps is an industry, you see.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Before reading this, I had just read this ESPN blog post about an Illinois D-Lineman who eats 6,000 calories a day and though, wow that’s a lot. Can Phelps really eat twice as much as a guy who weighs 264 and has to eat 6,000 calories to stay at that weight? If so, then his impressiveness is even more impressive
August 13th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Interestingly, it appears that many bloggers are on a similar regimen.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
The thought of his grocery bill burns my brain. I’m betting he was on the “all you can eat” meal plan at Michigan.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
This is about as believable as that story about Obama lifting the 70lb dumbbells in Germany.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Tour de France riders eat that many calories on their bikes. After the rides they have real meals. Getting enough calories is a serious problem for endurance athletes. It’s harder than you think, since you can’t actually just eat a pan full of brownies and expect to compete on a serious level.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Actually, I recall a feature on him from the 04 Olympics that made it seem like that exact same set of food was a routine, a ritual of sorts. You know athletes are superstitious, so its not totally incredulous.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Can Phelps really eat twice as much as a guy who weighs 264 and has to eat 6,000 calories to stay at that weight? If so, then his impressiveness is even more impressive
Running burns about 120 calories per mile for a competitive-for-an-amateur 150 pound runner running at, say, an average of 9 mph (e.g., me). That’s approximately 1100 calories per hour. My understanding is that hard swimming burns about 2/3 the calories of hard running (it takes less energy to move a body through water than it does over ground), so figure a comparable 150 pound decent swimmer is burning 750 calories/hour.
Now, Phelps isn’t swimming constantly for the hour in most cases, but (1) he weighs more than 150 pounds and (2) he’s swimming harder when he does swim. I’d estimate his burn right at that 750 calories/hour. Maybe even as high as 900 calories/hour or so.
His basal metabolism has to be pretty high given his muscle mass and aerobic capacity. If the average 23 year-old male (who already will have a high metabolism) burns about 2500 calories/day at rest, I suspect that Phelps probably is upwards of 4000 calories/day. The question then becomes: How much does he have to train to burn the remaining 8000 calories? That’s simple math, and the answer is 8-10 hours. Now, if he was anything except a swimmer, I’d be skeptical — but swimming is essentially a no impact sport, so it’s probably feasible (you’d have to worry about hypothermia, except he’s engaging in vigorous physical activity during this time).
So, I guess I can buy it that he eats so much.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Somebody should write an illustrated children’s version of this article: “The Very Hungry Swimmer”.
And I want to know how much faster he’d be if he weren’t lugging a grocery cart around in his guts. Perhaps that’s why he drinks that coffee.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
This probably describes his diet only at the most intense part of his training. At the beginning of the training schedule, and during taper, he probably eats a little more like a regular human being. No doubt his usual diet is a good deal more calorie-packed than an average office worker, though.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The story is written in such a way as to make it seem as if he eats this exact same set of meals every day, but it seems to me that if you’re in a position to eat so much you ought to take advantage of the situation and incorporate more variety.
I’d get the sense that having to pound that much food every day isn’t a thrill, it’s more like work, part of the training. Having a regular rotation of things you know you can eat to meet your caloric requirements is probably a bit different than deciding which neighborhood bistro’s menu you’re gonna run roughshod over today.
Plus: pancakes are good, man.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
IIRC, NBC said he’s swimming more than 5 miles/day this week (races, training, warm-ups, etc).
200 laps/day ?
August 13th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I don’t know much about training. But if you’re maintaining your body temperature of 98F in a pool at maybe 72F for several hours a day, you’re burning a lot of energy before you even swim a yard.
The real question about Michael Phelps is whether he’s a vampire: he has extraordinary strength and endurance, he seems to have fang-like teeth, and I’ve never seen him outside in daylight. All this talk of omelettes sounds like a cover-up to me: he’s really breakfasting on the blood of three pigs. I just know if the dope testers can detect that yet …
Anyway, congratulations to him for a set of amazing performances.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Just so people know, when Phelps is doing his normal training schedule he is swimming 80,000 meters a week. That’s 49.7 miles. A week. In Beijing, he is not just swimming the events — the heats, semis, finals — he also has to do morning swims, warm-up swims and cool-down swims, which all total a little over 5 miles of swimming a week in these Olympics. So yeah, I’d say 12,000 is perfectly reasonable.
And Tour de France riders do not eat 12,000 just on their bikes. Have you seen their musette bags? There is only one feed station in each non-time trial stage of the Tour.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
when Phelps is doing his normal training schedule he is swimming 80,000 meters a week. That’s 49.7 miles.
At the typical 8:1 ratio, swimming 50 miles is roughly the equivalent of running 400 miles (wow — even the hardest training marathoners only do half of that, and most elites are in the 120-150 range). That means a calorie burn of roughly 50,000 calories a week, or 7,200 or so a day. That’s certainly within the ballpark of the 8,000 I estimated above.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Regarding variety – the times in my life that I’ve been training hard (and nowhere near as hard as that), I didn’t care about variety. I was just so hungry I wanted specific types of food. Pasta was awesome. Plain pasta – maybe with a little butter and parmesan. Milkshakes were unbelievable.
Still – 12,000 calories?! That seems like a lot to me.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Obama’s “70-lb. dumbbells” were probably a garbled report from a European reporter who thought the numbers on the dumbells (brought from the US, no doubt)represented kilos.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think 12K is a bit high – I’ve seen him in interviews where he discusses that he eats between 8K and 10K calories/day. Plus video of all of the restaurants in Michigan that were excited when he moved to town! Because he apparently doesn’t cook.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
But does he bath in Cheetos? And how many calories can you absorb through your skin anyway?
August 13th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Knowing a little about top-ranking swimmers, I suspect he eats more or less the same thing. Not just ritualistic, but this is a discipline where there’s a lot of tolerance for the dull. (Okay, I’ll say it: all of the competitive swimmers I’ve encountered are pretty boring.)
Now, I think 12,000 is an exaggeration, but not by much: Tour de France riders take in between 7-10,000 a day, depending on the stage, and while swimming is a different kind of event, there’s a lot of muscle to support, and the need to simultaneously have an empty stomach and a huge glycogen store to replenish during races.
The other thing I know about top-ranking swimmers: during the week after the gala’s over, they’ll be getting laid a lot. The Olympics offers unrivaled variety in that regard. Now, I have no idea whether Phelps is typical, but if he were to be partying and boinking everything that moves, it wouldn’t be surprising. One hopes that the team employs people to keep the press away.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
12,000 calories a day? Wow. Even 6,000 a day? Also wow.
Please forgive the ignorance I am sure that this post will be riddled with, but it seems like having a section of individuals consuming between 6 and 12k calories a day is pretty environmentally untenable. Additionally, I doubt that there are many vegetarian professional athletes, and so alot of those calories likely come from meat, which certainly has a large environmental impact. We don’t even need to go into the frequent air travel. What is Phelps’ carbon flipper? Has there been any research on the envrionmental impact of sports?
I fear professional sports may be the Hummers of our entertainment. However, I have no evidence to back up that fear.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Eating that much really does sound like work. If I had to eat an entire pizza and a pound of pasta for dinner, I’m sure I’d get really bored with eating well before I was finished.
Here’s another thing about Phelps I haven’t seen discussed anywhere. He seems to have a unique swimming style. I don’t really know about competitive swimming, but none of the other swimmers I’ve seen in this years Olympics swim freestyle the way he does. They all keep the rhythm of their right and left arm pretty consistent, like the 1 and the 3 in a 4 beat measure. Phelps keeps his arms much closer together. More like on the 1 and the 2. Kind of odd. I imagine we’ll see a lot of swimmers copying this style very soon.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
If this is meant ironically or as a parody of an environmentalist position, heh. If this is meant seriously, be aware that it reads like a parody.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Here’s another thing about Phelps I haven’t seen discussed anywhere. He seems to have a unique swimming style. I don’t really know about competitive swimming, but none of the other swimmers I’ve seen in this years Olympics swim freestyle the way he does. They all keep the rhythm of their right and left arm pretty consistent, like the 1 and the 3 in a 4 beat measure. Phelps keeps his arms much closer together. More like on the 1 and the 2. Kind of odd. I imagine we’ll see a lot of swimmers copying this style very soon.
I know what you mean. It’s not unique – I remember seeing it done by other sprinters (Biondi, maybe? Popov?) – but it’s certainly not usual. I’ve certainly never seen anyone at the high school level swim that way.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
A tip of the hat to Joe for the great back-of-the-envelope calculations.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Yuck. Isn’t it possible to consume that many calories in a somewhat healthy manner? I hope Pfizer is one of his sponsors, because he’s going to need a massive daily dose of Lipitor to deal with all those eggs and cheese.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I, too, call upon Phelps to eat a more varied diet. Think of the possibilities! He could pay homage to Beijing by eating an entire Peking duck, plus a live duck for comparison. He could get back at the trash-talking French team by sticking an entire French loaf into his mouth. He could show his support for Georgia by drinking a tray of satsivi sauce. And imagine the endorsement deals: he could be the first McDonald’s spokesman in a long time to honestly say that yes, he’s tried everything on the menu. Today.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I had a friend who was consuming about 6,000 Calories a day on the Appalachian trail (vegan!) and was having trouble maintaining his weight — meaning he was losing too much weight and was having trouble carrying as much food as he needed to eat.
If you’re exercising a lot, you can eat a lot, too.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I can believe 12000. When I was a college student I was in the running for the skinniest human on earth at 3k calories a day. I cranked it up to about 7k per day and finally managed to gain some weight, and I was just being 18, not swimming at the highest level on the planet. Phelps has a metabolism like a blast furnace. As for the Lipitor, forget it. Nothing hangs around long enough to stick.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Well, considering the amount of blood they give for drug tests, I’m sure they can get a cholesterol test done every once in a while, gratis.
Want to be able to eat more carbs? Try swimming just a mile or two a few times per week.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Fried eggs with mayonnaise? That just about made me puke.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Guy’s going to be dead before fifty.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
He won’t be dead before 50, but he will gain a ton of weight. I don’t know if it’s that atheletes can’t transition to a lower calorie diet or if the human body just explodes when you’ve worked out that hard for that long and just stop, but when sports guys retire they always put on a bunch of weight. Then they usually slim down a bit to get back on tv. I’m sure though that as far as the toll that high level sports takes on a body, swimming is probably the least damaging. You’re not pounding your body into things like football, hockey, or gymnastics. You’re not breaking down your knees as badly as a runner. I’m not saying there aren’t health impacts, but I doubt he’ll fall to pieces when he gets older.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
When I was riding my road bike 250+ miles a week, I literally couldn’t keep weight on, no matter what I ate. I ended up getting down to 136 pounds (I’m just a hair under 6 feet tall.) My family thought I had an eating disorder.
I was eating minimum 6000 calories a day. It was a bloody chore, and it stopped being fun really quick. Like Scott Herbst said upthread, pasta and milkshakes are great. I used to get back from a ride, throw a quart of milk, two or three scoops of ice cream, and 4 tablespoons of sugar into a blender and suck that back.
Then I’d have to eat an hour later because I was starving. It’s tedious.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
I don’t know about the exact numbers for swimming, but the estimates above for running are too low, if anything. A competitive distance runner burns approximately 100 calories/mile, except that there are limits to efficiency and scaling, so this number becomes much higher when competing in races or doing “fast” workouts. At an average of 15-20 miles/day, this is already 2500 extra calories. Elite athletes also do a number of stretching and strengthening exercises to help aid in recovery, so they are frequently training for 6-8 hours total, adding another 2000 or so to the running component. This also bumps up the baseline metabolism by quite a bit, so 7000-9000 calorie days are completely reasonable – I frequently consumed 6000-7000 as a lousy college distance runner.
Not too difficult to do as a vegan either – the secret lies in vegetable oils and nuts.
Since swimming is lower impact and uses more muscle groups, I could easily see even higher caloric needs.
August 13th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
This also bumps up the baseline metabolism by quite a bit, so 7000-9000 calorie days are completely reasonable – I frequently consumed 6000-7000 as a lousy college distance runner.
Ditto.
I currently run marathons (2:55ish). During peak training (75-80 miles/week), I’ll drop a pound or so a week unless I consciously try to maintain weight. I don’t eat meat, so that’s lots of cookies, nuts and cheese. I usually go from my non-training weight of 160-165 to my racing weight of 140-145 in about four months, and then I really have to struggle not to drop any further when the “if you lose another pound I’m leaving” comments start coming from my wife.
August 13th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
“it seems to me that if you’re in a position to eat so much you ought to take advantage of the situation and incorporate more variety.”
I would think you would want to stick to what works. With all of that eating and training, I wouldn’t want an upset stomach from trying new and/or exotic foods.
While it doesn’t list total calories, the following blog link is interesting in covering Karl Meltzer’s ongoing Appalachian Trail speed record attempt and what he eats. Ultramarathoning day after day in the mountains is probably about as calorie intensive as it gets: http://www.whereskarl.com/?q=node/129
August 13th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
When I swam at Nationals in college, I lost weight despite eating as much as I could, 4 times a day- and I could eat a lot. And I wasn’t swimming the program Phelps is.
It just takes a massive amount of calories to sustain that sort of activity. Phelps will be, for the next several days, either actively swimming, warming up, warming down, or “warmed up” (the point to warming up is to jack up your metabolism to increase your performance) basically all day, every day.
For those concerned about his health… his problem isn’t too much food, it’s maintaining his weight and strength while performing at that level.
August 13th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
When Dave Scott was winning the Hawaiian Ironman competition regularly, he used to set his alarm for the middle of the night, to squeeze another large meal in, because it was so difficult for him to consume enough calories in normal waking hours to support his physical exertion.
12,000 calories a day for a guy who swims 50 miles a week seems completely believable to me. As was noted above, just spending that much time in water that much below 98.6 degrees will use a ton of calories.
August 13th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
He must spend a lot of time on the toilet. How much of that food mass is converted to usable energy?
And to David Houghton at 1:31pm: I’m pretty sure Tom at 1:23pm was joking. The bit about the “carbon flipper” gave it away. :>
August 13th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
When I was a marathon runner (and at 3:30, I was far from elite), I ate pretty much the same things I do now, plus 1 loaf of bread, daily.
August 13th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
As a semi-endurance athlete and 21-year-old male with a naturally high metabolism, I’m going to chime in and agree with, well, everyone else. First, I’m almost certainly over 5000 a day, and I don’t really consciously work out for the most part (I’m a ballroom dancer, so I dance a lot both training-ly and socially, but I run myself so far into the ground doing that and being a full time college student that I don’t have energy or time to do regular workouts as well). So someone who just trains and swims, at that level? 12000 seems totally reasonable.
Second, at some point you don’t want variety. You want what works. I know that even for me, a lot of my diet is driven by what will actually keep me full. You don’t want simple sugars, because you digest them really quickly and then you’re hungry again. And you can’t keep going for a long time; they give you a huge spike and then a huge crash. And I, at least, have the issue that my stomach just isn’t big enough; I often wind up running out of stomach volume while I’m still hungry and want more calories (which leads to the interesting sensation of simultaneously wanting to puke from having eaten too much and being ravenously hungry). So I know some foods that have enough caloric density that I can actually get what I consider a full meal out of them. Generally involves lots of french fries and fried meat. (Yes, I eat 5000 calroies a day of french fries, hamburgers, and fried chicken, and I lose weight.)
Third, to all of you worried about Phelps’s health: working out cuts down on cholesterol and other heart disease risks. I bet his cholesterol is really low, because the dude swims 50 miles a week. I know that despite my above-mentioned grease-centric diet, my cholesterol level is actually bordering on being too low.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Contemplate the sad spectacle of Phelps at age 40, 10 years retired, weighing 450 lbs. . . .
August 14th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I know what you mean. It’s not unique – I remember seeing it done by other sprinters (Biondi, maybe? Popov?) – but it’s certainly not usual. I’ve certainly never seen anyone at the high school level swim that way.
Part of it is that he breathes every other stroke. I know I see a lot of Olympic swimmers doing this, but we of the lower echelons of the swim heirarchy always had it drummed into us that you _must_ breathe on both sides of your body, or risk compromizing shoulder injuries later in your career, sort of like with pitchers.
Also, look to see how much of the time Phelp’s hands are outstretched in front of him in freestyle. That’s one of the best measures of how good a swimmer is in freestyle – how long their arm’s fully outstretched, versus how long it takes them to do a freestyle cycle. I’m guessing a bit here, but maybe Phelps rests one of his arms in front for longer than the other. Maybe this helps. Personally I think it’s because the man’s built rather like a motorboat, and thus can school people in butterfly and free.
August 14th, 2008 at 9:18 am
What I was originally going to say was that last Olympic cycle I remember a similar article going on and on about how he ate a stack of a dozen plate sized chocolate chip pancakes every day. Maybe his diet does change?
August 14th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Given the fact that my current caloric intake is roughly 4.5k/day just to handle my work exertion and a short 5 mile daily bike ride I’d say yeah, this doesn’t strike me as unbelievable at all. Phelp is an order of magnitude above even most elite athletes, needing that many calories to sustain the effort isn’t unbelievable in the least.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:14 am
My lord. I’m gaining weight just reading about that diet. God help him when he comes off that training regimen. They’ll end up breaking out a wall to take him to the funeral home at that rate.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I’m 54 and have been swimming on a team of some type since I was 6. I still swim in the masters program now. 3000-3200 yds a day, 2-3 times a week. When I was around 20, I was swimming about 1/3 of what Phelps is now in distance, but nearly the same amount of time in the water. I ate everything in my parent’s house and lots in the houses of several other friends. I figured I was eating 7-10k calories a day most days. Most of the swimmers I know are and were the same. We eat a lot of what we like to eat. Phelps must like to eat what he does. What difference does it make to anyone else what he eats? His metabolism is high and I have absolutely no doubt his chemical balance is wonderfully healthy. There is no reason that anyone has to “balloon” later in life. I know a few people who have, but most stay active and healthy. Stop the sniping and just enjoy watching a phenomenally gifted athlete who found the perfect sport for his physique and developed the mental toughness to endure the training regimen. As one competitor said, “Phelps is from the future”.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
I hate to brake it to everyone but its actually 1,200 calories a day…
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:06 am
levitraI bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
March 11th, 2009 at 9:19 am
I want to say – thank you for this!
March 13th, 2009 at 5:24 am
Great site. Good info
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:33 am
tramadol
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:12 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
buy cheap viagra
April 16th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I bookmarked this site, Thank you for good job!
viagra