I just read Ottermatic’s post on the difference in how the diets of Michael Phelps and female swimmer Kate Ziegler are presented by the media. She linked to this post in which video clips on the topic are provided.
And the clips are ridiculous and infuriating. Ziegler calls herself a pig for eating a couple of slices of toast and a couple of eggs after a workout. And her trainer is an asshole, shaming her for her supposed former diet including instant oatmeal, cereal, pizza, and burgers. Note that Ziegler herself cops only to the instant oatmeal and cereal, saying she didn’t eat a lot of pizza or burgers before–but I guess even once is too many if you want to win approval as a good healthy thin little girl.
I am just so heartsick that the concept that there is something wrong with you if you are a woman who eats more than, say, 1,500 calories a day, or more than 350 calories for a meal, or anything other than local raw unprocessed organic whole grain low-fat-except-olive-oil grass-fed salt-free lean protein, has now bled over into OLYMPIC COMPETITION. I am all in favor of nutrition, but let’s fucking leave these people alone to work out their own dietary and training needs so they can optimize their performance. I believe that at some point the calorie mania–under which diet rations somehow became the only “normal” and “acceptable” level of intake for women in our society, regardless of their individual needs–is going to start degrading women athletes’ performance. And I’m sure that will just end up being fodder for people to remind us how female athletes are not as good as male athletes, or whatever.
Along similar lines, Ziegler’s statement that because she eats several small meals or snacks instead of three squares, she’s “eating all day long,” echoes an idea that you hear all the time in, say, a Weight Watchers meeting. Somehow 6 200- or 300-calorie snacks a day (something like which is often recommended on diets because it supposedly keeps your blood sugar on an even keel and keeps you from getting too hungry and overeating, as you might do if you had to wait several hours between traditional meals) becomes a veritable feast that you almost feel guilty for indulging in. I’ve heard numerous women come in and claim that you get so much food on WW, they can’t eat it all!1! So not only do we have to eat like we’re dieting/starving all the time, we have to convince ourselves that this is not only an adequate but actually almost an excessive quantity of food. We almost don’t deserve even the tiny amount we get. I’m sure there aren’t any gender issues or Puritan values mixed up in that. Note I’m not blaming Ziegler for making the statement–nor do I know how much she personally eats–it’s just that the sentiment felt very familiar to me from weight-loss dieting. And IMO concepts from weight-loss dieting should not be getting mixed up in the long-term maintenance/performance regimens of world-class athletes.
Incidentally, instant oatmeal is not “fake.” I’m sure some of the flavored kinds have stuff in them that is not nutritionally ideal, but the oats in the little packet are still real and still “count.” You know, as sane people everywhere could tell little miss “clean eating” trainer there.
I’m even a little irritated that there is starting to be some backlash against Phelps in the form of look how unhealthy, look how he doesn’t cook, look how much he eats. (Not at Ottermatic or Sociological Images, just in general after NBC aired the info on his diet.) If he eats like that and is still possibly the best swimmer of all time–getting better all the time by all accounts–then I’m gonna say he’s fueling his body the way it needs to be fueled regardless of whether that makes “sense” to me or not. I really enjoyed Sandy’s post on that topic.
Anyway, the exact composition of Phelps’s diet is not really a topic of major interest to me, and also I’m sure he’s about as sick of being asked about that as he is of being asked about his medal count after team events. (Seriously, STOP DOING THAT, NBC! I have to cringe and look away whenever they interview him because the fawning and medal count obsession are so obnoxious.) Plus, if I were him, I’d never be so candid about my diet again because people are slavering over the details so much. It’s sort of creepy. And I think that hurts us as a society because IMO people need to know that athletes in general eat a lot, and they need to eat a lot–some more than others, some less–and that is OK.
Not to mention that eating “clean” is in no way a magic bullet that guarantees optimal performance. I’m sure if Phelps thought his performance would improve by switching to an all-natural diet in line with the latest nutritional standards, he’d have already made the change. We have the most bizarre investment in this country in the idea that if you just eat x and y, and never touch n or z again, you can achieve any outcome you like, up to and including immortality. In reality, I’m pretty sure we would have to have evolved as a species to function well on a wide variety of food sources, even “suboptimal” ones, and I see no reason why there would be one true ideal diet (except on a highly individual basis) that would allow you to function vastly better than another.
Again, I speak in generalities; I do believe that it’s a good idea to eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, minimally processed foods, limit your intake of chemicals, etc. I am also 100% in favor of people eating healthily and in such a way that they feel great and have lots of energy. I’m just not sure that the way to achieve this is anywhere near as universal or black and white as we’ve been led to believe, or that eating “clean” with no exceptions whatsoever is going to do any more for you than simply eating as “clean” as you can the majority of the time. And when you eat a truly wide variety of foods (which in any case is going to be easier to achieve when you’re an athlete with increased caloric needs) in amounts that are appropriate for your personal body, then my suspicion is you’re going to easily get the nutrition you need to function well.
Finally, it is irritating, but not surprising, that nobody has connected the dots around all this and gone, hey, this guy is a special case but maybe not all thin people eat sparsely? And maybe not all fat people are lying when they say they don’t eat that much? Even on an Olympic training schedule, I’d say calories in/calories out goes out the door when you’re consuming up to 10,000 per day. You’d almost think we were all unique human beings with unique metabolisms or something.
August 14, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Two things:
“I’ve heard numerous women come in and claim that you get so much food on WW, they can’t eat it all!1!”
THANK YOU. I remember being on WW and hearing women around me say that. I remember sitting there thinking that there must be something wrong with me because I was hungry ALL THE TIME. (And you know what’s funny? Outside WW, people are constantly commenting on the fact that I don’t eat a lot at one sitting. Never have. But on WW even *I* was hungry.)
Second thing:
I think people (i.e. the media) don’t realize how much food you have to eat to get that many calories. I mean honestly, my sister (with her humming-bird metabolism) eats about 4,000 calories a day to maintain her weight. That is a LOT of food, and if she ate “clean” foods all the time, she wouldn’t get enough calories. So when she’s hungry, she eats calorie-dense food (like pizza and pasta and bread). If she eats totally “cleanly,” she loses weight she can’t afford to lose (she is 5’8″ and wears a size 4) simply because “clean” food isn’t calorically dense enough to meet her requirements. I wonder if Phelps eats the way he does for similar reasons. I wouldn’t be surprised.
August 14, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Oh wow, this is a really good analysis!
The whole “clean” foods thing reminded me of that “no white foods” thing. What does that even mean???
August 15, 2008 at 12:05 am
Love you for this:
(And no, there are no gender or Puritan issues there. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain plzkthx.)
Also love you for this:
Even the fire-breathing furnace that is Rafa Nadal admitted on his blog to once (!) eating McDonalds on tour.
I think it’s a good thing I’m not Michael Phelps. I might say something at a presser like: “I have 10 Olympic gold medals. You can be quiet now. No more questions. Thank you.”
August 15, 2008 at 12:05 am
It’s littlem up there. Sorry ’bout that.
August 15, 2008 at 7:22 am
Oh, good lord, agreed: if I eat ‘clean’ all day, I usually end up having to eat ice cream (oh, what a chore) or something else dense after dinner in order to make it so that I get more than like 900 calories in a day. And I don’t have a hummingbird metabolism. (My brother got that metabolism. Sometimes I hate him, and sometimes I realize that it’s kind of a chore to eat six meals a day.)
(Hi. Came over via Fatosphere.)
August 15, 2008 at 10:47 am
Yeah, I think Phelps does eat that way for the same reasons your sister does, littlem, as I heard the announcers comment “He says he has trouble keeping the weight on!”
But I wanted to point out, in response to your final point SpacedCowGirl, that Phelps burns about 4,000 calories each workout. So if he’s burning that much, I guess you could make a case that calories-in/calories-out does still apply. Although probably that’s not all there is to it, cause that’s still 4-6,000 more calories he’s eating than he’s burning.
August 15, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Marste–glad I’m not the only one who noticed this depressing phenomenon at WW. And that is a great point about your sister. It did occur to me that if you needed an unusually large amount of calories to maintain your weight, it would be very tough to cram them in if you were trying to do it on a vegan, raw food, or otherwise strict diet. I mean, trying to get in 4,000-10,000 calories a day without having to literally eat constantly must be a challenge anyway. It sounds like that is indeed the case.
OTM–Thank you! And that is such a great point–“clean” almost has to mean different things to different people, but people talk about it as this monolithic thing. I think “clean eating” exists in a broad sense only as a theoretical ideal that you must constantly beat yourself up for not achieving. (Still love “no white foods”… ah, crazy MeMe.)
littlem–Thank you too. And I know, if I were him I’d have freaked out by now. I don’t know how he has the patience.
Hi Stephanie! I agree, even if you have a normal metabolism, eating “clean” in the way we often think of it makes it pretty challenging to get adequate calories. Of course, I suspect many people’s metabolism slows down drastically when they attempt to do this, and eventually you can’t eat more than like 800 calories a day without gaining weight. Problem solved, right? I mean, except for how everyone will assume you eat Extra Value Meals 3 times a day and start lecturing you to “get off the couch once in a while.” (Of course I’m speaking in generalities here as far as metabolism… obviously everyone’s different.)
Lalaroo–that is another good point. I think I failed to take into account exactly how energy-intensive Phelps’s workouts would be. And like most athletes, he seems to be composed entirely of muscle and bone so that would probably make his metabolism very fast even if he were just a sedentary dude who happened to have that body type (rather than it being a result of his training). I guess your way of putting it is better… calories in/calories out applies, it’s just not as simple as fat-hating armchair experts think it is.
December 6, 2008 at 8:19 am
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