LONDON, ENGLAND – We all know that what you eat is pretty damn important when it comes to sporting prowess. If you want to be a great athlete, you have to eat a great diet. If you start to approach professional level sports, suddenly everyone around you will become completely obsessed with what you’re eating. Parents, coaches, team mates, friends, managers…they’ll all subject your diet to some pretty intense scrutiny, and devote one hell of a lot of time to telling you what you should (or, more often, should not) be eating, and why. So it’s a bit surprising to find that the diets of some professional athletes leave – well – quite a lot to be desired…
Fighters Drink Piss
Your body goes to a lot of trouble to get rid of your wee. It has spent millions of years carefully evolving a system whereby it extracts and jettisons substances it does not want in the form of urine. Whereupon, if you’re a martial artist, you apparently pick it up and happily tip it right back into your body. You’d think that drinking your own piss would be a pretty niche thing to do, indulged in only by fetishists and Bear Grylls. However, it transpires that several athletes are regular pee-drinkers. Mexican boxer Juan Manuel Márquez premiered his piss-drinking proclivities to the press ahead of his 2009 fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr, boasting that it gave him an edge. It didn’t – he lost – but the martial arts community’s faith in the power of pee was undaunted. Brazilian mixed martial artist Lyoto Machida has since expressed his fondness for indulging in urine-based beverages before fights, while former UFC fighter Luke Cummo has spoken seriously about the need to “bind moisture to protein” within his body by drinking his own widdle. Bear in mind that these are men who avoid diet coke like the plague for fear that it may cause some kind of unspecified harm to their physiques. They will, however, happily and eagerly glug down the waste that their bodies are explicitly trying to reject. Make of that what you will.
Caron Butler Went Into Mountain Dew Withdrawal
NBA veteran Caron Butler has spoken with moving and raw honesty about his addiction to…Mountain Dew. Apparently, so severe was his Mountain Dew habit that a number of people in the league remonstrated with him about it, warned him that he had a serious problem, and offered to help him quit. But Butler just couldn’t stop chasing that Dew dragon. When working with Kobe Bryant – notorious for keeping his athletes’ diets under rigorous control – Butler went full Furtive Wino, hiding Mountain Dew in plain packaging, sneaking sips from hidden cans etc. “I can get away from the streets”, he lamented, “[but] I can’t get away from Mountain Dew”. When team-mates began to warn him that his 2-liter-a-day habit could ruin his career, Bryant attempted to go cold turkey. Whereupon he got the Mountain Dew DTs. Yes, apparently you can drink so damn much Mountain Dew that you get withdrawal symptoms when you give it up. Bryant had shakes, sweats, headaches, the lot. Now, he claims he has his Dew abuse problem under control. However, he has been seen swigging from the odd bottle since getting ‘clean’, leading some to wonder whether or not he’s toppled from the Mountain Dew wagon.
Tristan Thompson Despises Fish
Cleveland Cavaliers center Tristan Thompson absolutely will not touch fish. Nothing wrong with that, lots of people don’t like fish. His reasons for avoiding fish, however, are perplexing. “Fish eat their own poo”, he told ESPN last year, “So I’m not eating fish”. Best not introduce him to any martial artists.
Olympians Have The Worst Diets In The World
Eat the best to be the best? Forget it. If Olympic gold-medalists are anything to go by, all you have to do to be a top athlete is stuff your face with McDonalds. Usain Bolt, Olympic sprinting champion, went off message big-time in both the Beijing and London Olympics by telling the world that he ate 100 McDonalds chicken nuggets a day (he’s since cleaned up his culinary image by adding a few vegetables). Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte ate McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the Beijing Olympics – and won four medals on his 10,000 calorie-per-day, virtually vitamin-free diet. And if reports from the Beijing Olympic village are anything to go by, athletes were mainlining candy by the truckload. If the body of an Olympic athlete is a temple, it’s one of those sleazy Roman temples with an integrated vomitorium.\
When you’re through vomiting, please feel free to comment/regurgitate below and come back tomorrow for a man that will sniff your underarms, Different Matt!
