The Michael Phelps Diet: Don’t Try It at Home

The Michael Phelps Diet: Don’t Try It at Home
Posted by Sarah Rubenstein
Michael Phelps celebrates another gold medal and another 12,000-calorie day.

Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating. Besidesb 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 choose among 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 this calorie-use chart from the American Heart Association and a calorie calculator from Runner’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.

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Iowan climbs Everest, now attempts to swim Channel

By MICHAEL J. CRUMB | Associated Press Writer
   
 

DES MOINES, Iowa - Five years after Charlie Wittmack trudged to the 29,035 foot summit of Mt. Everest, he'll soon attempt a 21-mile-swim across the English Channel.

If he's successful, the 31-year-old trial lawyer from Des Moines will be the first American to achieve both feats. Only three others have done it, an accomplishment known as the peak and the pond.

"It's a challenge that's been floating around in adventure circles for a while now,"

Wittmack said in a telephone interview from England while waiting for seas to calm enough for his attempt.

If the weather cooperates, Wittmack plans to dive into the waters of the English Channel about 10 a.m. Friday at Shakespeare Beach in Dover. He hopes to climb out of the channel on the French coast about 12 hours later.

For Wittmack, it's his latest venture into the world of extreme sports.

On May 22, 2003, he reached the summit of Mt. Everest. He trained seven years for the climb and once there, he found himself in what he said were the worst conditions ever recorded on the mountain.

"I spent three days without food or water and a day without oxygen above 20,000 feet," Wittmack said.

The conditions in the English Channel should be considerably better, but not without risk.

"We expect the water to be up to 67 degrees this week -- at that level hypothermia is still a major concern," said Wittmack.

Wittmack, who swam for Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, began training for the channel swim about three years ago. For the past six months, he's been training four hours a day, most of it swimming. He has been swimming every other weekend in either Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, and he's competed in a 12{-mile race in Key West, Fla.

He said his experience on Everest inspired him to attempt the channel crossing. "I realized after that that my body was predisposed for climbing at higher elevations," he said. "After Everest I wanted to try something that would be as great a challenge and I decided on the English Channel."

Michael Reed, president of the Channel Swimming Association, confirmed Wittmack would be the first American to accomplish both feats. The other swimmers were from Britain, Greece and Mexico.

Wittmack said plenty of people in adventure circles consider the dual challenge, but few have attempted both.

"The reason it's difficult is because of the body's physiology," he said.

Wittmack said climbers, such as himself, tend to be shorter with less body fat and a high weight-to-strength ratio. By comparison, long distance swimmers tend to have higher body fat, which makes them more buoyant, and taller with longer limbs to help propel themselves through the water faster.

Randy Clark, the manager of the exercise science laboratory at the University of Wisconsin Hospital Sports Medicine Center in Madison, Wis., said that while mountain climbers and distance swimmers tend to have different physical characteristics, there is an underlying similarity.

"There is some cross over in physiological and psychological makeup," he said. "Anybody that is able to climb Mt. Everest or do anything that is highly physically demanding over a long period of time, it takes incredible cardiovascular fitness, and I would say the same about swimming the English Channel.

"You can't underestimate the need for incredible cardiovascular fitness to pull off either of those events, let alone both," Clark said."

Wittmack arrived in England nearly two weeks ago and in his first practice swim in the colder water his legs "seized up."

"My thighs seized up after an hour and I wasn't able to use my legs," Wittmack said.

He's been swimming every day since then to get his body acclimated to the water, resulting in a natural warming of his core body temperature, Wittmack said.

"As the body adapts to cold water, if it anticipates it is going in cold water it artificially increases the core body temperature, so for the past week or so I've been running a low grade fever of about 100 degrees," he said.

Organizations that govern the swim require that athletes only wear swimsuits, not wetsuits that could shield them from the cold or the kind of swimwear that Olympic athletes used that helped them break so many world records in Beijing.

Once he begins the swim, Wittmack said his team will closely monitor the weather conditions and the tide. There have been few successful crossings of the channel this August because of high winds.

Strong tides also can complicate crossing attempts, sometimes pushing swimmers 15 miles or more off course.

"It's not uncommon to get stuck in a current and swim for an additional six hours," Wittmack said.

His wife, Catherine, and their 6-month-old son James have joined him on the trip, along with the couple's parents.

Wittmack said his father-in-law is a physician and his own dad is "kind of a sailor." Both will be in the boat that accompanies him on the swim.

"It's going to be a great challenge, and that is what really appeals to me," he said. "These are things where you have to be at your absolute peak of physical conditioning, mentally as strong as you've ever been and have some luck."

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