Usain Bolt says he ate a thousand chicken nuggets during the 2008 Olympics

Does this look like a man who just ate a hundred nuggets? (Getty Images)

When you're an Olympic athlete, your body is a finely tuned machine, a precise instrument of competition dependent on exactly the correct mix of nutritional elements to fuel optimum results.

Unless you're Usain Bolt, in which case you just devour Chicken McNuggets by the truckful and outrun the entire planet anyway.

In his newly published memoir, Bolt reveals that during the two weeks of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, he scarfed down an estimated one thousand nuggets. In excerpts referenced by the New York Post, Bolt called Chinese food "odd" and decided to give McDonald's a try. And for the publicity he's about to give McDonald's, he deserves some sponsorship coin:

“At first I ate a box of 20 [McNuggets] for lunch, then another for dinner," he writes. "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."

Apparently that wasn't enough; Bolt estimates he vacuumed down 100 nuggets every 24 hours for ten days. Also during that time, he happened to win gold medals in the 100 meter, 200 meter, and 4x100 meter relay events. It's reminiscent of the old story about swimmer Michael Phelps, like Bolt one of the most decorated Olympians in history, eating 12,000 calories a day during his training. (Phelps later said the story was untrue.)

Nutritionally, each nugget contains 47.5 calories and 3 grams of fat, so Bolt was consuming 4,750 calories and 300 grams of fat from nuggets alone. For perspective, the average American male takes in 2,512 calories and 93 grams of fat per day, while the average woman takes in 1,778 calories and 66 grams of fat.

In other words, if you're not running fast enough to burn off nearly 5,000 calories of nuggets each day, you might want to avoid Bolt's diet.