Pooling his many talents

The thing about these stars, who are renowned for exploits that have nothing to do with cooking, is they all profess a long-standing passion for cooking. In Thorpe's case, this interest goes back to his early childhood when he cooked at the knee of his nan.

''If I was sick from school, I would be at her house helping to make a cake, or smelling the aroma of a cake baking as she made one,'' he writes in Ian Thorpe: Cook for Your Life.

He began taking an interest in cookbooks and pestering his mother to try recipes. From the age of 10, he was making the family meal on Sunday nights. By 15, he was a world-champion swimmer and, as Thorpe points out, this meant a whole new relationship with food. It became fuel to sustain him through training 40 hours a week and competing at an elite level.

''I had to learn about nutrition in order to avoid taking truckloads of multivitamins,'' he says.

Most competitors turn to vitamin supplements but Thorpe was uneasy after discovering they contain creatine, which acts like a steroid.

Thorpe tailors his diet for training. He makes sure he gets protein for muscle development and repair, fish and apple-cider vinegar for the muscle-relaxant magnesium, slow-release carbohydrates and nutrients from plenty of vegetables.

One of the joys of training at an elite level is wolfing down as many kilojoules as you like. But Thorpe, whose training regimen means he provides email responses to our questions, knows that eating plate after plate of carbohydrates is not an option for most people.

When he stopped competitive swimming, he had to dramatically decrease his meal sizes. ''My body went through a lot of chemical changes and I had radical cravings for starch. My body cried out for it and I must admit I gave it what it wanted.''

Since he announced a return to competitive swimming late last year, he has reportedly lost 18 kilograms. He is clear about how to do it: it is all about the kitchen. ''If you try to lose weight in the gym, you'll be spending an awful lot of time there,'' he writes. ''Did you know that a medium banana, which has approximately 440 kilojoules, would take you 10 minutes of active aerobics to burn off? One potato would take 16 minutes of walking …''

As for Thorpe's recipes, this is a book that urges restraint. If you have a glass of wine with dinner, don't have dessert.

Avoid white rice, or at least be wary of it. He makes risotto not with rice but with barley, and substitutes cous cous with raw cauliflower. After breakfast, he avoids carbohydrate-based meals. For a pad Thai he uses strips of squid instead of noodles; his ''fettuccine'' is made not from pasta but from zucchini; and mash is made from parsnips or white beans. He even classes sushi as a special-occasion dish.

But it is dessert, Thorpe says, that is really people's undoing; it feels great at the time but the sugar and fat can undo a whole day's healthy eating.

''I try to recognise that wanting dessert is a craving rather than hunger … once you're in the habit of not looking for something sweet to cap things off, it's quite easy to forget about it.''

Needless to say, the dessert chapter is not the biggest. There is a mango and berry soup, a recipe for a mandarin cake without flour or sugar, and a chocolate souffle.

Thorpe has trained himself to eat nuts and berries rather than sweets.

''Retraining that [post-exercise] reaction has taken time for me but now I'm reaping the benefits of having more sustained energy levels,'' he writes. ''You know how you're really good at giving relationship advice to other people but bad at giving it to yourself? Think about this in regards to the food you eat.''

He eats a limited amount of red meat, using palm size as an indicator for a meal. And he favours organic and grass-fed beef rather than grain-fed.

He has an intriguing Japanese recipe for pork in his book for which onion juice is made by blending and straining four onions, then used to marinate pork fillets. The solids that have been strained from the onion juice are used as part of a Japanese-style dressing to serve with the fillets, which are pan-fried.

Thorpe has turned another pitfall for athletes - endless eating in hotel restaurants - into a positive. He once asked hotel staff if he could cook his own dinner and ended up in the kitchen. ''The head chef then asked me if I would like to help cook for the guests, so to everyone's surprise I started cooking at the restaurant. The first night, I cooked an assiette of lamb served on lentils.''

Ian Thorpe: Cook for Your Life, by Ian Thorpe. Published by Hardie Grant, PB, $39.95.