Cookies, ice cream and eggs: Incredible 7,000-calorie diet of Irish Olympic medal winning star
Philip Doyle and partner Daire Lynch won bronze in the Men’s double sculls.
Olympic rowing star Philip Doyle has revealed how cookies and ice cream help fuel his incredible 7,000-calorie-per-day diet.
The bronze medal winning ace must consume a massive amount of food every single day or risk being vulnerable to stress fractures and performance-affecting weight loss.
Doyle won bronze with partner Daire Lynch in Paris this summer - Ireland’s first heavyweight medal - in the men’s double sculls.
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The pair breezed through their heats and won their semi-final, before finishing behind Romania and the Netherlands in their final.
As tough as their training is - they often pack in three sessions per day - fuelling that workload can be equally as challenging, especially when it comes to evening time.
That’s when Banbridge native Doyle breaks out the calorie-filled cookies and ice cream.
“We are eating around 7,000 calories most days just so we are not losing weight,” he told Fitter Happier.
“You would lose weight very easily. I had a bout of reflux in camp one time and I went down four kilograms in 24 hours. I couldn’t get the right volume of food in, the weight fell off me and I ended up with a stress fracture from that.
“When you drop the calories like that, your oestrogen levels and your hormone levels start to fluctuate, and you absorb calcium and minerals from non-impact bones.
“Your ribcage is very much a non-impact bone, but there is so much stress on it from the rowing. We are very prone to lower back and rib stress fractures.”
So how does he fuel himself?
“You always have to start with a base layer. I just try to eat a base of nutrition where I get all my protein and everything in,” he explained.
“Salad leaves aren’t going to add too many calories, so once you get your base nutrition of your good carbohydrates, your proteins and fats, then on top of that you are just eating cookies, ice cream…
“We do a lot of smoothies - strawberry and mango smoothies, but with half a block of ice cream in there and maybe a bit of double cream and full fat milk and maybe a bit of protein powder.
“We usually make those up in the evening. They could be 1,000 to 1,500 calories per shake. That will do over the night.
“Then a packet of Dunnes Stores or Marks & Spencers cookies, that’ll be 400 calories per cookie and they come in packs of four or five. If you can put away a pack of them, you are getting plenty of calories in. You just have to eat what people would call dirty food.”
Most people would love the idea of being able to tuck guilt-free into a pack of chocolate chip cookies - but for Doyle and his fellow rowers it can be a chore.
“You always enjoy the first cookie in the pack, you probably enjoy the second one if you have a nice cup of coffee, but you don’t really enjoy the third and the fifth one is a chore,” he said.
Eggs make up a big part of his daily diet and Doyle is speaking to us ahead of World Egg Day, in which he has teamed up with Bord Bia to mark the occasion this Friday.
“Obviously there are a lot of eggs in that. Myself and the lad I live with, we have a little house in Cork, if you walked in, the amount of eggs in the corner, you’d be asking how many people were living there. But it’s just the two of us,” he said. “I would have four to six eggs a day.
“We would get up in the morning and have a basic carbohydrate breakfast, something light for the belly.
“Then we would go down on the water and maybe spend two and a half or three hours there. Then it’s straight back in for a brunch. We’ll do two big wraps or sourdough, or a bagel, and we’ll smother it with scrambled eggs with goat cheese or jalapenos and cheddar or mozzarella.
“We’ll have halloumi, bacon, avocado… it doesn’t look like the cafes have them on Instagram, but we lather a bit of relish on top of that or chilli sauce. Usually one of us will cook, so you could be putting 10 to 12 eggs into the pot there.
“Sometimes we’ll have weights, maybe three or four days a week. Then the other days we might have a longer rowing session in the evening. So you need something to sustain you through.
“Then we have another small snack before that next session, if we are doing three sessions.
“There are times where you don’t want to be frying up a chicken or steak or mince, and the eggs are handy to get your protein in. Omelette and chips? It’s handy and so good.”
He added: “Bord Bia have given me some really good dinner recipes for eggs. So I’ve been making that for my mother, getting sliced potatoes in vegetable stock, buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes, veg and then you crack eggs over the top of it. It’s almost like a potato bake with eggs on top.
“She’s a typical Irish lady; ‘Where’s the meat?’. But she had a big scoop of it and she reached for seconds.
“We’ve been playing around with some of those recipes and it’s been great.”
# Philip Doyle, Olympic bronze medallist rower & medical doctor has teamed up with Bord Bia to celebrate World Egg Day 2024 on Friday 11th October. Visit bordbia.ie/eggs-crack-on/ for further information.
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