You know that feeling you get right after Thanksgiving dinner, where the fibers of your stomach lining are in a full yoga-stretch, the sinews of your abdominal wall literally making that cracking sound like corn in the midwest during growing season?  You know how you think to yourself, soon, all this food will digest and I'll get some relief?

I feel like that all the time.  

Why?  I'm on the Michael Phelps diet.  According to a BBC piece by Michael Hirst, the following is an average day's food intake for the newly-crowned eight-time Olympic Gold medalist:

Breakfast: Three fried egg sandwiches; cheese; tomatoes; lettuce; fried onions; mayonnaise; three chocolate-chip pancakes; five-egg omelette; three sugar-coated slices of French toast; bowl of grits; two cups of coffee

Lunch: Half-kilogram (one pound) of enriched pasta; two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread; energy drinks

Dinner: Half-kilogram of pasta, with carbonara sauce; large pizza; energy drinks

The whole thing tallies 10,000 calories.

What am I thinking, you ask?  The internet is abuzz with protesters who claim that Phelps is responsible for numerous third-world food crises. His chewing muscles are better developed than his lats.  The produce section cowers when his nutritionist enters Whole Foods:  bananas frantically try to summon a soft and brown countenance; avocados flex their flesh, trying to pass as tough and unripe in hopes of being passed up for tastier fare.  

It does them little good, for Phelps is a human eating machine, and no carb is safe in his wake.

At 37, I've begun to face a very, very few "I will never" facts:  I will probably never play professional basketball, for instance--but only because I don't like playing the game.  It has nothing to do with my extremely average vertical jump or my relatively diminutive stature--I have just never liked b-ball.  Sorry, Lakers, you can turn right around with that fat contract--I'm just not interested!  

I'm still hanging on to several options that I consider comfortably within the realm of possibility:  movie star, supreme court justice, curer of cancer.  I see people buying lottery tickets all the time, and I figure that my chances are at least as good as theirs.

Anyway, now that Phelps has won gold medal number eight, shattering world records with practically every stroke of his pterodactylian limbs, I've decided that I may in fact fall short of a Phelpsian level of athletic greatness.  

While he was winning his first seven, I still thought I had a chance, but at eight, Mark Spitz and I had to face the plain truth:  Michael Phelps is probably at least a somewhat better swimmer than I'll ever be.  As Adam Carolla recently pointed out, however, if Spitz hadn't been quite so attached to his extremely un-hydro-dynamic '70's era 'stache, he probably wouldn't have had to spend the last week crafting his congratulatory note.

But wait, I thought, just a hundredth of a second before I tearfully crossed "Win Eight Gold Medals in a single Olympic Games" off my lifetime to-do list.  Who am I to give up on this dream without even trying?  Have I ever swam for five hours a day?  Have I ever consumed 12,000 calories in a day?  And even if you count the time when I was six at the beach and came home lobster-red and that other time when I ate seven pies on a dare, have I ever done these things consistently?  And isn't consistency the key to success?

Encouraged, last Friday I embarked on an effort to duplicate Michael Phelps' eating and training regimen in anticipation of my shot at 2012 Olympic Glory.  So far today I've eaten seventeen eggs, three loaves of Wonder Bread (I wet the loaves, bunched them all into a sticky, floury ball and ate the whole thing like a huge apple), a whole fried chicken (skin on), a Pizza Hut Meat Lovers® pie with extra cheese, a two-gallon jug of strawberry blast Vitamin Water, a bag of Tootsie Rolls, and several mackerel.

Except for the cramping, difficulty standing, and frequent naps this eating schedule requires, it hasn't been all that bad.  The training, however, has been a little harder to pull off.  I've tried to put in Phelps' five hours of swimming, but I have to tell you it's very difficult.  For one thing, there just isn't time between meals.  The food is simply not very buoyant and I wind up losing my proper swimming posture.  Moreover, I haven't figured out how to keep the food I keep at either end of my swimming lane dry, or how to keep it hidden from the lifeguards at the "Y," who insist that there's "No food or drink in the pool, Mr. Heffernan, I don't care what your blog is called" ("Male Pattern Fitness" is tattooed across my lower back).  They are also upset with me because they've had to resucitate me multiple times, though they've offered to waive my monthly gym fee if I'm willing to serve as a live dummy for their CPR classes.  

My first endorsement contract!  It's not Speedo, but it's a start. 

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What does everybody think of these high-priced fat camps?