S.M.A.C. — Oh Those Olympians And Their Fad Diets

I’ll admit it, I’m always a little envious when I watch the Olympics. Technically, I am still an amateur athlete myself, and I am eligible to participate in the Games. So I guess you could say I choose not to tryout out for Team USA.

But that might change after I saw the special diet U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps is on.
This guy is more of an animal in a breakfast nook than he ever was in a pool. To be able to stay on the 5-hour-a-day, 6-days-a-week superhuman workout this dude is on, Phelps has to consume at least 4,000 calories at every meal.

Breakfast on the “Gold Medal Diet” is a real hoot. He starts off with three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. He then drinks two cup of coffee before sucking down a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

For lunch, Phelps has a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. He finishes off the meal with 1,000 calories of energy drinks.

His last meal of the day is mainly carbohydrates and includes a pound of pasta and an entire pizza, plus 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

Then he goes out and dominates the best swimmers in the world, like, every 24 minutes. He has already won more gold medals than any other American Olympian and, so far, is 6 for 6 in gold medal swims this week, setting world records in each event.

The high-calorie intake is mainly so the guy can get through his own workout. And if it takes 12,000 calories a day to get through it, then so be it. This is Phelps’ last go-around in the Olympics — he will swim 17 times in nine days in Beijing — before he joins the competitive eating circuit.

So what you’re saying, Mike, is I can eat whatever I want and still be an Olympic champion?

Sold.

I, unlike Phelps, don’t have Olympic Village chefs on call to measure out 4,000 calories and fix my meals. So I am going to have to make do because, you know, I’m in training now.

As far as I can tell, I am way behind at breakfast ... like 3,100 calories behind. That sausage, egg and cheese McGriddle, hash browns and tea just isn’t cutting it. I guess I could buy four of the meals, but my budget is more Class A cross country regional than Summer Olympics. And dropping a sawbuck in West City every morning is not an option.

My lunch regimen is impossible to measure. About 10 a.m. every day, someone at my office yells out ‘What’s for lunch?’ and the debate begins. It ranges from a salad some days to all the major meat groups on others.

I’m not much of a calorie counter, but I do know that green foods — except for the last of the Christmas ham — are good for you. So I guess I will load up on brown foods, you know, for my country.

I guess it is kind of ironic that I have Olympic aspirations at this stage of my life. I never really got into the Summer Olympics too much over the years, but Phelps has made me a fan. I watch every night.

And I can’t help thinking about the OTHER Michael Phelps I know when I watch Olympic swimming. The two men are total opposites. The MP I met in my previous job doesn’t even know how to swim. And he is afraid of water. So that is pretty funny, but I can’t lose focus on my task of finding 12,000 calories a day to consume. The good news is that I have a little over four years to figure everything out.

Hopefully that’s enough time for me to learn to like energy drinks.