Olympic athletes are high-powered machines that push the human body to the limits of performance. To fuel that extreme athleticism they must fuel their bodies constantly. For U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte that means consuming 6,000-8,000 calories each and every day.
Lochte has won 12 Olympic medals over his impressive career (six gold, three silver, three bronze), which includes one gold medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio when he helped win the Men’s 4x200m freestyle relay.
So he apparently knows what he is doing by shoveling that much foodstuffs down his throat.Lochte’s culinary tastes range from pancakes to avocado toast to fettuccini alfredo to Kind bars to tofu sausage to ice cream. Then there is the Lochte family tradition of having pizza and wings every Friday night since he was a young boy, which he still practices to this day despite being an all-world athlete.
To give you an idea as to how much and how often that Ryan is gorging:
“When I first started [professionally swimming], I was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and now I’ve stopped. I was just constantly eating, and I was getting tired of eating. My jaw was getting sore. But I guess I’ve been doing it for so long—I’ve been doing it for 12 years—that it’s eerie now. If I’m not eating, then something is wrong.”
His jaw gets sore from constantly chewing food. #Goals
I’m not sure if Ryan Lochte is a competitive swimmer or a competitive eater.
But it doesn’t hurt that Lochte has his own personal chef, Glenn Lyman, who used to be Lebron James’s personal chef.
From Bon Appetit:
About a week before a competition, he carbo-loads. A week of spaghetti, fettuccine Alfredo (“chicken alfredo is my favorite”), any and all carbs, plus chicken, steak, proteins “like that.”
Then, two or three hours before a race, he’ll have another full meal. No energy drinks, just a caffeine pill after that morning coffee, which replaced his soda habit (“because my weakness is soda.”) If he’s hungry in between events, a peanut butter Kind bar is always in his bag.
He’s been really getting into health trends, too. The other day, he had spiralized pasta, or as Lochte put it: “Instead of regular pasta, I had this cucumber pasta.”
Did he like it?!? “I was just like, oooh, when I saw it I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m probably going to vomit from this. This doesn’t look good. Where’s my other pasta?’” It was definitely good, he told me. “I would have it again, but I would want a big old steak next to it or something. I need something else than that.”
To replace his soda addiction, “ I’ve been drinking water with … You know those little drops?” We work out that he means the lemonade flavored MiO drops.
