The Amazing Diet of Olympic Athletes
There are a lot of reasons to be an Olympic athlete and the least of which would be their diet right? Wrong! Athletes need calories to keep their engines running at optimum speed and what they can eat will amaze you.
Some Olympic athletes maintain their prime physical condition by … eating an entire cheese pizza and a full pint of Ben & Jerry’s? Believe it. The New York Times takes a look at the outsize dietary needs of top athletes, who, as one doctor explains, can burn as many as 20 calories a minute. That means a fairly typical five-hour daily workout churns through 6,000 calories, which have to be replaced in order for the runner/cyclist/triathlete/etc. to get up and do it all over again the next day.
So what kind of dishes might they eat? Well, the aforementioned pizza and ice cream (calorie total: 3,000), plus a dozen eggs and a pound of pasta. Oh, and beer. Amazingly, some even lose weight on such a diet when they’re training their hardest. It’s challenging, explains the doctor, to get athletes to avoid processed junk food in their quest for calories: “You can only eat so much oatmeal and tofu.” (The Times notes that a serving of each of those contains less than 200 calories.) Challenge No. 2: Getting them to eat at all sometimes. “They’d rather nap,” says a dietitian who works with Olympians.
Many thanks to our friends at Newser for their contributions to this story.
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