What Caitlin Clark Really Eats In A Day

As one of the most exciting, inspiring, and undeniably remarkable athletes to emerge in a long time, Caitlin Clark is a newly-minted sports superstar. So, it follows that the world wants to know everything about her, down to the details of her daily routines. Setting all kinds of college basketball records during her storied run at the University of Iowa, and then selected by the Indiana Fever with the no. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft, Clark is a seemingly superhuman idol, and fans want to learn the secrets of her rise and phenomenal success. For many, considering she was recently a star college student and now a young adult, celebrity, and professional basketball star in her prime, it's worth looking into what Clark eats. 

Doing so could provide some insight into what fuels Clark. What she consumes on a regular basis provides a glimpse into how she can achieve and perform at such a consistently high level. Here's an overview of how Caitlin Clark enjoys and uses food each day, including some of her favorite meals, a few of her game day necessities, and a series of her beloved go-to treats.

The ESPN+ series "Full Court Press" debuted at the beginning of the 2024 WNBA season, coinciding with the professional debut of college basketball phenom Caitlin Clark. "Full Court Press" documented the day-to-day lives of three women's basketball superstars across several months, particularly Clark, during her senior year's preseason, season, NCAA tournament, and off-court life.

Throughout the making of "Full Court Press," producer Hannah Beir maintained daily contact with Clark during that highly competitive and physically demanding time. On taping days, she even volunteered to provide and procure breakfast for the athlete, which evolved into a routine favor. Clark's breakfast throughout the 2024 season, as provided by Beir, typically included a fast food-style bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich (which chefs actually eat), along with an elaborate coffee drink. That was often in the form of an iced macchiato with vanilla sweet cream cold foam. "It is the most classic college breakfast order," "Full Court Press" director Kristen Lappas told Forbes.

Just playing in a high-level college or professional basketball game, let alone being a star and a team leader, requires a lot of energy. And, of course, that results in significant calorie expenditure. This means that Caitlin Clark has to load up on carbohydrates and quick-acting sugars just before the start of a game to help ensure solid first-half play. At halftime, Clark again needs to consume an efficient source of carbohydrates to keep going through the rest of the game. To that purpose, and after her first professional game in 2024, Clark was seen eating Honey Stinger Energy Chews. These are fruit-flavored, snack-like candy nuggets, not unlike those bygone fruit snacks from the '90s you'll sadly never have again. Apart from being a source of sugary calories, they're also enhanced with vitamin C and made with sweet and invigorating real honey.

To a similar end and during her college ball days at the University of Iowa, Clark was spotted grabbing a fast calorie and energy boost with a serving of utensil-free applesauce. Her preferred brand and variety seems to have been a standard apple flavor of tubed GoGo SqueeZ, marketed generally as a kids' lunchbox side item but clearly more than good enough to fuel a top athlete.

Following a typical college basketball game — and for Caitlin Clark, typical means scoring a huge 28.4 point average over her career, leading all players on both sides, and amassing about one-third of the Iowa Hawkeyes' average 90 points per game total — the superstar was understandably pretty hungry. Her favorite post-game meal would be a carbohydrate-loaded, fat-prominent calorie bomb for the average diner, but not for one of the most top-level athletes in the world. When asked about her favorite thing to eat after a game while she was working to recover her energy, Clark didn't hesitate to name three of her most reliable choices. "Chicken parm, pasta, and a big glass of chocolate milk," she told the Des Moines Register (via Hawk Central).

Clark seems to get a lot out of an after-game sugar infusion, too. While playing for Iowa, she looked forward to a serving of warm chocolate chip cookies after a well-contested match. Even better, these had been baked at home and brought to the game by her mother, for both Clark and her teammates to enjoy.

Caitlin Clark grew up in West Des Moines, Iowa, and then moved across the state to Iowa City in order to play for the Iowa Hawkeyes women's college basketball squad. Hy-Vee is a dominant supermarket in the Midwest, with dozens of stores across Iowa. This proximity and familiarity helped to instill in Clark a love of the chain's in-house hot Chinese-American bar selections and its variety of baked goods. In a 2022 YouTube video, Clark described her affinity for Hy-Vee's Hai Chai entrees. "You can't go wrong with any sort of Hai Chai. My favorite's definitely broccoli beef, that's what I get," Clark said as she tucked into a dish of vegetable lo mein noodles. "You definitely cannot go wrong with an egg roll," she added as she ate one of those, deeming it to be her Chinese appetizer preference, edging out crab rangoon. And while sampling a Hy-Vee chocolate-covered old-fashioned doughnut, Clark fondly recalled a Saturday morning ritual of her youth when she'd get to grab her favorite treat — that would be a chocolate longjohn from the store's bakery. "Chocolate makes everything better," Clark explained.

Clark is such a Hy-Vee acolyte that in 2024, she launched a limited-edition cereal stocked exclusively by the supermarket chain. Caitlin's Crunch Time, as it's known, consists of frosted flakes made from corn and barley. Profits from sales of the cereal go to the nonprofit Caitlin Clark Foundation, which focuses on a variety of youth-centered causes in educational support, nutrition, and sports opportunities.

Because it's so deeply steeped in tradition and requires many households to feed many people with a variety of tastes, it's no surprise that the classic American Thanksgiving dinner features a fairly standardized menu. It's usually centered around a protein like turkey (and, yes, there's the right way to roast one). That protein is generally accompanied by a slate of sides that often include mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce — the last of which may be the most divisive dish on Turkey Day. But just because these things are commonly served at Thanksgiving doesn't necessarily mean they're universally popular. And as far as the annual special occasion of Thanksgiving, basketball star Caitlin Clark has her clear favorites as well as some items that she probably won't ever sample.

To be fair, some Thanksgiving classics are favorites of Clark. "Mashed potatoes and gravy and then you just pour so much gravy on it that it overflows onto your entire plate and you just have a pool of gravy on your plate," she said of her top choices in an Iowa Hawkeyes team video. On the other side of the spectrum: Clark doesn't dig swapping out a holiday turkey with an alternative. "The worst is ham. Ham is scary. Ham is gross," she baldly stated, before going on to intimate that she'd add cranberry sauce to that dubious group, too.