Michael Phelps might have singlehandedly upped pasta makers’ 2008 Q3 sales by carbo-loading on 12,000 calories a day prior to the Beijing Olympics, but Jamaican Sprinter Usain Bolt had a different dietary secret to success: Chicken McNuggets. Lots and lots of Chicken McNuggets.
In the ten days Bolt spent in Beijing, he downed approximately 1,000 nuggets, averaging 100 a day. At 940 calories per 20-piece box, that means that Usain ate about 4,700 calories worth of Chicken McNuggets a day and 47,000 calories over the course of his stay in China. (And that’s without Sweet ‘N Sour Sauce, which, let’s face it, only a fool would pass up.)
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“At first, I ate a box of 20 for lunch, then another for dinner,” Usain writes in his soon-to-be released autobiography Faster than Lightning. “The next day I had two boxes for breakfast, one for lunch and then another couple in the evening. I even grabbed some fries and an apple pie to go with it.”
All because he thought Chinese food was “odd.”
Rather than leading to hospitalization or limitation to movement via the floating chairs you saw the amorphous blobs use in WALL-E, Usain’s diet resulted in three Olympic gold medals for being really, really fast.
“Man, I should have gotten a gold medal for all that chowing down,” he writes.
How has there not been a commercial about this??
Read next: How Your Favorite Fast-Food Meals Are Changing
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