When one hears the word glutton, an image of a fat, bald-headed, laurel leaf clad Roman pouring an entire vine of grapes down his throat might come to mind. Or perhaps they may even envision Kevin Spacey shoveling 100 pounds of spaghetti into a portly sinner's gut till he busts (I'm not alluding to the movie, “Seven”. Kevin Spacey has been known to actually do that). Whatever the case may be, the last thing to come to mind is a set of six pack abs or a pair of 22” arms. That's because most people fail to realize the gluttonous, over-eating behavior that goes into maintaining a bodybuilder's physique. 

Bodybuilders are the unsung heroes of competitive eating. “Whoa!”, you say. “Bodybuilders are too busy building their bodies to challenge the likes of Cookie Jarvis and Eric Booker to an ice cream eating contest”, you say. Well, you are correct in that sense. However, competitive bodybuilding requires one to eat and drink well beyond the caliber of any normal person. Take 2006 Mr. Olympia winner, Jay “Cuts” Cutler for example. Jay Cutler is said to spend around $50,000/year at the grocery store alone. The monster that is Jay Cutler is known to make this happen by splitting up his intake into 10 meals/day, eating about every hour and a half.

His eating behavior is by no means unorthodox in the world of competitive bodybuilding. Similar methods of consumption can be found in the eating patterns of behemoths like Ronnie Coleman or freaks of nature like Vic Richards, who I've read is rumored to consume up to 20,000 calories/day. Even the fellas from the old school like Dave Draper, Bill Pearl, and the Governor of California were swines. It's no mystery why these machines eat with such aggression. When you spend your life grilling your muscles in the weight room, you need a way to rebuild them. This is pretty layman material, but it's important to know.

If a pro bodybuilder were to break down his physical priorities using the Deadly Sins model, it would probably go something like this (top to bottom): Eating (gluttony), resting (sloth), training (wrath), and cumming (lust). Arnold said that he cums in the weight room as well, but that's neither here nor there. “Arnold is numero uno”.

In order to get jacked, proper training through intense weightlifting for size and cardio for endurance and fine-tuning is obviously required, but eating like a horse is an absolute must. Anyway, the point is, to get your body to look nice on the professional circuit, you need to punish it in the weight room, show it love at the dinner table about 45 times a week, and then take it to bed for seven to nine hours every night.

Building your body is like housebreaking a dog so it doesn't piss in the house. You beat it unmercifully to near death, you pet it and fill its bowl to nurse it back to health, and then you put it to sleep so it doesn't suffer from all of the severe beatings that you've been giving it. See? It's simple when you use an analogy!

Bodybuilders, of course, aren't the only athletes who need to consume ridiculous quantities of food and drink to stay in the game. Generally speaking, an athlete living a lifestyle enriched with intense training is going to need to consume roughly 20 calories per pound of body weight to maintain ideal muscle mass. I'm more of a hobbyist than an expert when it comes to the field of nutrition, so although these numbers aren't just falling out of my ass, I wouldn't take them to the bank either.

Just so we're clear, I'm not saying that a 170 lb Olympic wrestler should be drinking 3500 calories worth of Budweiser every day (although if he does, he better video tape it and send it to me). Most professional athletes, bodybuilders especially, usually break down their diet into 55% carbohydrates, 25% protein, and 20% fat. I won't go into any further detail, but just know that I'm not advising that you drink a glass of peanut oil with dinner every night to put a tear drop on your quads.

Based on the previous formula for athletic consumption, I've created a chart to display the required dialy intake to keep some of "today's" "hottest" sports "celebrities" (not including myself) in their "current" robust states: 

** - Measured in solar systems, not calories. 

That's pretty neat stuff. I know that I came into this article focusing strictly on bodybuilders' eating habits, but isn't it nice to know that there are so many other multimillionaire athletes out there making the Seven Deadly Sins work for them? Yeh, it's real nice to know. Needless to say however, the sports that require athletes to rely almost entirely on muscle structure and raw power (bodybuilding, strongman, power lifting...) breed some of the most elite professional gluttons on the planet.

Eat well,

Dave Lopan