Before I started working one-to-one with high-achieving professionals in Southeast London, most of my work was in nutrition and strength and conditioning for combat sports athletes. Boxers. Kickboxers. Wrestlers. MMA fighters. People who regularly needed to make a specific weight-stepping on a scale at a specific date in order to compete.
What I found working with these people is that their diets are generally terrible.
Their attempts at dieting would normally be a mix of “clean eating,” calories shot far too low due to lack of proper tracking, and whatever medley of pseudoscientific wisdom happened to be on the Joe Rogan podcast that month.
Yet they would still manage to make weight.
Fighters would still manage to make weight even without me. Most of my work was just making sure they did it in a healthy way that allowed them to perform better. So how could this have been the case if they were doing everything wrong?
Let’s go through some of the best and worst things fighters generally do when making weight, and some of the lessons you can take from that.
Losing Weight Is Simple
The nutrition industry thrives off complexity.
Generally, the reason for this is that complex ideas and jargon communicate to people that whoever is speaking has a deep understanding of what they’re talking about. In addition to that, there’s an appeal to the idea that complex knowledge is the answer. You didn’t fail up until this point because of a lack of trying or a lack of consistency-it was just a lack of information.
However, while there are certain nuances in terms of dieting and long-term health that we’re still getting to grips with, the nature of losing weight in and of itself is relatively simple. It’s something we’ve understood for a very long time now.
If you ask your grandmother how to lose weight, she’ll tell you something along the lines of “eat a bit less and move a bit more.” And this is essentially the truth. Most of it comes down to energy balance. If you’re taking in less energy than you’re putting out, that energy has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is your energy storage-i.e., your body fat.
This is the first thing you would see play out with fighters. Some fighters would cut out carbs entirely. Other fighters would eat large amounts of carbs and low fat. Some would eat “clean.” Some would just eat less of what they normally eat.
And regardless of how they did it, they still fundamentally managed to lose weight.
Accountability Is Everything
While losing weight is simple, it is also extremely difficult. Your body hates being in an energy deficit. Especially if you’re not dieting in the right way, it can take a tremendous amount of willpower to maintain the course.
This is where accountability comes in.
Generally, 24 hours before a fight, there’s a weigh-in. You go to the venue, sit down on stage, and step on a weighing scale. If the scale reads your target weight or under, you get to compete. Nice round of applause. Good.
If your weight is over? Then the fight may well be off. You’ve wasted months of training, hundreds of pounds in ticket sales, and everyone else’s time-including your opponent’s.
This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on someone.
There are very few things people respond more strongly to than social pressure. The massive amount of pressure that comes with having to step on stage and have everyone see what you weigh-for your weight to determine whether or not you get paid as a professional athlete-is enough for anyone to put up with a little bit of hunger.
Weight Loss Is Easy, Weight Management Is Hard
Despite the fact that most fighters would be able to make weight even if they were doing most things wrong, there was an inevitable pattern you would see. Fighters would starve themselves down to that target weight, make weight, compete, and then immediately go on a massive food binge-gaining back all the weight they just lost near-immediately. Sometimes even more.
They would then hover around this new heavier weight until the next fight was booked, at which point they would begin the cycle of starving themselves again.
Breaking this cycle is most of what my work as a nutritionist involved. And it’s one of the most difficult parts of nutrition, both for athletes and for regular people.
Diets and before-and-after transformation packages will make sure to show clients losing huge amounts of weight in very short periods of time, with no mention of what happens afterwards. But the thing we know as a matter of fact is that 95% of people who lose weight on a diet gain it back within the next two years. Often much, much quicker.
As such, the real priority-and the real difficult part of dieting-is making it sustainable and manageable, such that you can lose the weight and keep it off later.
Low-Carb Weight Loss Is Mostly Bunk
Part of the way you make weight for a fight is by cutting water. In the week before the fight, rather than losing any more fat mass, you find ways to manipulate your body so that you eject an extra two or three kilos of water weight out of your system.
This way, you can regain that water weight before the fight and come in-hopefully-heavier than your opponent.
There are multiple ways to do this. The most common way that people know is through the use of saunas, salt baths, and so on. But one of the most effective ways is through manipulating carbohydrates.
Your body stores carbohydrates in your muscle tissue in a form called glycogen, which binds to water. For every gram of glycogen you keep in your system, you keep three grams of water. So by cutting out carbs over a week, you can drain all the glycogen-and a huge amount of water-out of your system as well.
This is a very good way to drop a lot of water weight without torturing yourself in a sauna.
However, this is also one of the reasons you’ll see people lose weight very rapidly on low-carbohydrate diets like keto and carnivore. You’ll often see people start these diets and lose three or four kilos in two weeks. What they’re losing isn’t fat mass. It’s water from the glycogen.
So while the scale says something very impressive, it doesn’t actually translate to anything meaningful in terms of body composition. It also means all the glycogen used to power their muscles is now gone, making training and maintaining muscle mass much more difficult throughout.
With fighters, we would typically stuff them full of carbohydrates again the moment they got off the scale, so they would have enough glycogen in their system to perform.
However, if what you care about is how you look rather than just a number on the weighing scale, there’s no real reason for you to do this at all.
Takeaways
The most valuable lesson from working with fighters is this: losing weight as a number on a scale is arbitrary, and doesn’t require a perfect diet. A much better point of focus is accountability and sustainability
If you’re in South East London looking to lose fat and keep it off without sacrificing your performance at work or in the gym, I can help. Get in touch using the button below to discuss how we can build a sustainable approach.