How Do Olympic Athletes Eat?
Some Dietary Guidelines for Athletes
The 2026 Winter Olympics just wrapped.
Plenty of memorable moments: from Ilia Malinin’s backflips (nicknamed the “Quad God”, and you know every bodybuilder got jealous that they didn’t think of that one), to Alysa Liu and both the US men’s and women’s hockey teams taking gold, and even Lindsay Vonn’s terrible injury.
These are literally world-class athletes, and in order to fuel training and performance and recovery, it’s important for them to have world-class-athlete diets. So, what does that look like? More importantly, for us, is there anything we can learn from how they eat?
Well, Ilia, Alysa, and the US men’s and women’s hockey teams haven’t returned my calls (yet), so I haven’t been able to pick their brains about their diets, but fortunately, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s (USOPC) sport nutrition team working together with the University of Colorado Sport Nutrition Graduate Program put together some dietary guidelines and recommendations specifically for athletes and Olympians so that they can keep themselves healthy, fueled, and recovered, helping them be the best athletes they can be.
The result of their collaboration is called the Athlete’s Plate.1
First, some background. Athlete’s Plate is based on the USDA’s MyPlate2, which replaced the Food Pyramid in 2011. Recently, the inverted pyramid has become the infographic of the new dietary guidelines.3
MyPlate is based on a whole-foods diet, visualized as a circular plate of food divided into four non-equally sized quadrants.
· One the left side of the plate, the bottom quadrant is veggies, which is about 60% of that side, and the other, smaller quadrant is fruits.
· On the right side of the plate, the sizes of the quadrants are inverse to the other side, with the bigger side (the top half of this side) composing of grains, and the smaller quadrant (now the bottom half of this side) composing of foods that we think of as protein.
Athlete’s Plate follows this basic template with some small changes. First, there are three different days offered. The first day combines fruits and veggies into one section, so we end up with three sections: fruits and veggies; grains; and lean proteins. The other two days also have three sections: grains, veggies, and protein, and two servings of fruit are left to the side of the plate.
Another key difference is that MyPlate is fixed and static, whereas the Athlete’s Plate if flexible and dynamic. So, instead of offering a single infographic, the USOPC offers three, one for a different potential type of day:
Easy training days and/or weight management: days with not very demanding training sessions, skills work, off/recovery days, and/or periods where calories need to come down.
Moderate training days: this might include two training sessions, where one is hard but the other is technical (like a skills-based session).
Hard training or competitive days: composed of something like two hard training sessions or a race or other competition.
On easy training days or days where an athlete is attempting to manage weight (as in, drop a couple of pounds): half of the plate is fruits and veggies; 25% is lean proteins; the other 25% is left for grains; however, the portion of this side is reduced so that an athlete can easily (or easily enough) create a little bit of an energy deficit through reduced food intake. Fats are presented as a teaspoon of oil. Apart from proteins, grains will be the most energy-dense foods on a plate, so cutting back on them will free up some calories.
On moderate training days, about one-third of the plate is divided into each group, maybe slightly less towards protein and more towards the other areas. Also, fruits become a side item instead of being a staple on the plate. Fats are presented as a tablespoon of oil. Athlete’s Plate advises that this variation form an athlete’s baseline for eating. We can think of the sections on the plate as dials, and this plate is our starting point, and we’ll dial the other sections up or down depending on how hard we’re going, or not.
On hard training or competitive days, half the plate is grains, and then fruits/veggies and protein each get about a quarter. Fats are presented as two tablespoons. Energy intake should not be limited on these days—within reason. We need fuel for each session, but we also need to recover between those bouts. It makes sense to slightly reduce fruits and vegetables because they are the most fiber dense and therefore the longest to digest. You don’t want a ton of food sitting around before you need to perform. Likewise, grains are easy to digest and are packed with energy to fuel physical activity.
Protein is kept pretty constant throughout the iterations and despite the varying levels of what the athlete needs each day. Amino acids that make up protein are the building blocks of many tissues and systems in the body. As important and essential as they are, they are not to be thought of as energy sources and therefore remain the steadiest. Though, it’s also understood that there’s also a slight variability here as well. For example, if you’re overly or unusually sore, it might be a good strategy to slightly spike protein intake for a day or two.
Athlete’s Plate recognizes that the energy demands of training and recovery vary, so food intake should match what’s needed and when it’s needed. One of the core tenets from this approach is that there is a variety of whole foods that are regularly eaten, but the distribution of some of those foods increases or decreases depending on what the athlete needs.
This approach also gets to the kernel of what’s called autoregulation—having an awareness of adjusting variables as you need to. It’s great to have a plan and being happy to follow it, but sometimes the plan should adjust, which means we have to adjust first. We must first be adaptable. We can all get caught in following a diet or program zealously, to the point that it becomes an impediment or even detrimental. When we autoregulate, we understand that changes are made to promote our training, recovery, and ultimately our goals. To that end, we must be flexible.
In periods of energy restriction, autoregulation might manifest in realizing that you need to bring up your calories for a few days. Other days you might need to scale it back. With training, you might realize that you need to step it up a bit or pull it back.
Another great thing about Athlete’s Plate is that it’s individualized. You choose the foods you like and want among the different sections. It doesn’t tell you what not to eat. It also doesn’t obsess about counting calories or macronutrients, that is, how many grams of carbs, fats, and proteins you should have. If anything, it makes athletes more aware of how much or how little whole foods they may be getting.
You might not be training to be an Olympian, but I’d wager that there are periods of your week when you’re more active than usual and other times you’re not. The northeast and mid-Atlantic just got hit with a blizzard, and right now, there are probably millions of people doing a lot of snow shoveling, which is a lot of anerobic work. Likewise, there also might be days or periods when you’re not training as much or as hard, but you need to recover, repair, and heal up, and that also requires energy.
Even though Athlete’s Plate is an educational resource to show athletes how to form a healthy diet, it’s something we can all follow. Moreover, it shows us how to eat to fuel as well as how to eat for health, which are not always synonymous. We could fill up our plates with junk food and have adequate energy, but we wouldn’t be providing our bodies with adequate nutrients for recovery and subsequent performance, so what we can all learn from athletes and from the Athlete’s Plate is that we want to eat for performance and recovery, as well as health and that the proportions of different types of foods will vary from day to day or week to week, depending on our current needs.
It’s easy to be intimidated by athletes and everything that goes into their training and nutrition. On the Perform podcast by Dr. Andy Galpin, he ends every episode with the same line:
“In the words of Bill Bowerman, ‘If you have a body, you are an athlete.’”
Myplate.gov
Realfood.gov