Appetite for destruction

9 kg meat,9 kg bread

According to the writers Athenaeus and Pausanius,Milo of Croton,a wrestler,consumed 9 kg of meat,9 kg of bread and washed it down with 8.5liters of of wine a day. Clearly the 57000 calories he ate worked perfectly for Milo,who was famed for his strength and would be undefeated at five successive Olympics from 532 to 516 B.C.

Most Olympians however don’t eat anything as extreme as Phelps or Milo. Depending on their event,sex and weight competitors numbers vary significantly. While most swimmers need to eat around 6000 calories daily,at some other corner of the Olympic Village,a female gymnast may be eating just a third of those numbers. For while Phelps is a swimming machine,his numerous events needing sustained doses of energy that foods like the choco-chip pancakes provide,divers,gymnasts or even sprinters,utilise shorter,concentrated bursts of energy. Even discus throwers despite being amongst the biggest athletes of the games need only around 3500 calories daily.

While Olympians tend to eat more than regular people,they also need to eat more frequently — roughly eating about every two hours. With far more muscle than the average person,they have a furnace like metabolism and food must be constantly consumed to keep their fire burning.

More than just calories

Calories however are only one aspect of diet. While endurance athletes need to get much of their calories for carbohydrates,most take a protein intense diet with strength athletes needing to consume around 1.7 gm of protein per kilo of body weight. Antioxidants are also key because athletes produce a lot of free radicals,which result in cell damage.

All athletes need to fit in their requirements of proteins,fats and other nutrients into their daily figure. Gymnasts,who are slender in size and work in short bursts of energy,have to pack daily nutritional needs into far fewer calories. This tends to come with its own drawbacks. It has been reported that between 15 percent and 62 percent of female athletes experience disordered eating and that gymnasts have elevated instances of both disordered eating and amenorrhea,or absence of regular menstrual periods.

There are similar issues even in the case of athletes who compete in weight division sports like boxing and wrestling. The yo-yo dieting to cut weight ahead of a weigh and the accompanying dehydration and starvation leads to a marked drop in performance.

There are of course athletes who go the extra mile to get that competitive edge. Before the 2008 Olympics,the Chinese men’s rowing team regularly ate bull penis soup after working out to boost testosterone levels. Unfortunately they didn’t win anything. Their women’s team,who were served deer antler soup,however,won their country’s first Olympic gold.