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.)
Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now.
“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
Listen to the most important stories of the day.
- Why Cell Phone Reception Is Getting Worse
- The Dirty Secrets of Alternative Plastics
- Israeli Family Celebrates Release of Hostage Grandmother
- We Should Get Paid for Our Online Data: Column
- The COP28 Outcomes Business Leaders Are Watching For
- The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023
- The Top 100 Photos of 2023
- Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time
