10,000 Calories a Day?! Without Gaining Weight?!

Olympic Champion Swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte put down some serious food!  After his record-breaking appearance at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps became known for something other than all those gold medals – his 10,000-12,000 Calorie diet.  And Ryan Lochte just recently tweeted a picture of himself about to consume one meal of supposedly 10,000 Calories worth of food.  One meal with 10,000 Calories?!?!

And yet, when you look at the picture, he somehow still has defined abdominals.  Crazy.  How in the world is that possible?

Well to be honest, it is pretty simple…at least the concept is simple.  When you swim up to 6 hours a day on most days of the week, you burn a LOT of calories.  Swimming for this long could easily burn 1800 calories, which is serious stuff.  If you didn’t eat enough with this kind of regimen, you would become a skeleton.

US Government guidelines recommend that we get at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 5 times a week, which is a decent amount of exercise.  These guys get probably 12 times that.  Let’s consider a few points with all of this being said:

1. Think outside the box a little with your exercise.  We compartmentalize our exercise so much that we feel good when we can check our 30 minutes of exercise off our checklists for the day.  And yeah, you should feel good.  But considering what these guys do for a living, consider that you probably could add a little more in there, especially if you are not seeing results.
2. I am not recommending that the average Joe or Jane train like an olympian!  I just want to backtrack and make sure all understand that I believe we all can learn from these champion swimmers, not try to do what they are doing necessarily.  Plus, before you do any new exercise routine you need to check with your doctor anyway.
3. Their example is no license for us to eat a lot of junk, and then “burn it off.”  For one, gorging on junk food is only going to make things harder for you.  Chances are, you would not have enough time to burn it off if you could.  Secondly, we must remember that there is much, much more to health than weight loss.  In other words, you can be thin because you burn the junk food off and still get sick because of how bad the junk food is for you.

Even still…let’s be inspired by Michael and Ryan.  How much do you work out?  Are you really doing enough to get the results you need?