Three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast and three chocolate chip pancakes hardly sounds like a meal that makes a champion.

But that is what U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, has said an average breakfast for him consists of. "Eat, sleep and swim. That's all I can do," Phelps told NBC when asked what it takes to win gold medals. "Get some calories into my system and try to recover the best I can."

Phelps said he consumes around 12,000 calories a day while in training. Compared to the 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends for healthy men, Phelps' diet alone is one of astronomical proportions that most people would be hard pressed to match, let alone his performance in the water.

For lunch, Phelps said he drinks energy drinks that add up to 1,000 calories, a pound of pasta with tomato sauce and two ham sandwiches on white bread. For dinner, Phelps said he eats six to eight slices of pizza, another pound of pasta with tomato sauce and energy drinks.

"The short of it is that being athletic and being fit has its privileges," said Jeff Kotterman, director of the National Association of Sports Nutrition. "Basically, Michael Phelps' metabolism is so fast that his metabolism needs an enormous amount of calories. So eating 12,000 calories a day isn't an enormous amount of food compared to his metabolism."

Kotterman also said it is hard to argue with Phelps' approach when it comes to eating.

"Look at his physique and look at his performance and it speaks for itself," said Kotterman. "He is able to maintain recovery from each event such that he can win a gold medal in the next event or contribute to one, and he can maintain a lean physique. He's leaner than the average swimmer as well. He looks to me, from looking at the pictures, to be 7 or 8 percent body fat."

Kotterman also said that Phelps' performance and athletic abilities are simply on another level that few athletes ever reach and that comparing diets to an average person makes no sense.

"Like Lance Armstrong, these are athletes that are off the measurable scale for determining regular metabolic rate or physiological performance," said Kotterman. "These guys are at the extreme top, so we can't apply average everyday physiology of a lay person to an elite athlete like these. They are genetically gifted and trained."