0-1: Diet and Making Weight

Holy crap, this is definitely the thing I most severely underestimated in terms of importance and challenge in fight preparation.

I fought at 165.

This isn't a crazy weight for me -- before training actively for Muay Thai, I weighed between 170 and 180. Closer to 170 usually. I don't really know. I never weighed myself. 

I was nervous about making weight. Partially because I never weigh myself. And partially because it felt like it'd be such a failure of will and preparation and the spirit of the fight to come in heavy. So, it's probably also true, I got into a mindset of making sure I got as low as possible rather than as close as possible to my weight. This isn't good, in case that's not clear to you. If your opponent is 165, you wanna be 165. You don't wanna be 161. You don't wanna be 168, sure -- but you also don't wanna be 161.

It also really, really did not help that I do not own a scale. Because it meant that I'd spend the latter half of my days not eating in order to weigh myself not-full-of-food before training, which was unpleasant and also not nutritionally optimal. It also meant that I had one data point, the moment of weighing myself before training (after training, you've lost so much water through sweat that it's misleading), and so things would all hinge around that data point. This was a dumb way to handle a big part of the weeks leading up to the fight. For fight two: buy a scale, you crazy kid.

So here's the deal, which you have read/thought/heard many times if you've been anywhere near any level of competitive fighting. Making weight kind of sucks. It sucks because
-- you are anxious about not making it and being an a**hole
-- you are occasionally wondering if your guy is/is not making the sacrifices you are, and getting preemptively angry at him about that
-- you are thinking about food at a time when you just want to be eating a lot, fueling your hardest training, all accelerating as fight day approaches (before, thankfully, tapering off in the days immediately leading up to the fight).

So, it sucks.

It also truly does not help not to have a scale. People, if you ever fight, get a damn scale. That's a solid gold lesson.

In the days leading up to the fight, I would eat
-- a bowl of cereal in the morning
-- two small protein-y meals throughout the day (a piece of chicken and some greens; a piece of fish and some greens)
-- then, at night before training, something for energy (a potato; a protein/sports drink)
-- and afterwards or during some protein powder in water.

I'd snack on cashew nuts. It felt like I was doing this a lot, but in the eight days or whatever leading up to the fight I didn't even make it through a bag of Trader Joe's Thai Lime and Chili Cashews (which are awesome).

It sucked. In comparison: today, the day after the fight, I have eaten

-- two fried eggs

-- a BLTA (veggie bacon, lettuce & tomato, avocado)

-- a serving of fries

-- a serving of homefries (my girlfriend didn't want hers)

-- 5-6 cookies worth of unbaked cookie dough

-- handfuls and handfuls of Japanese rice cracker snacks

-- 1/2 a tangerine

If we add the post-midnight meal I had after the fight early this morning, then I have also eaten

-- a large flour quesadilla

-- a small huatlacoche corn quesadilla

-- a tamarind aqua fresca

-- 1/2 of a papaya shake

That's more than I usually eat, but not honestly a ton. I eat a lot.

So, to make weight I was really cutting my diet. Thing was, I overdid it and cut it dumb. I should have bought a scale, and swapped to maybe a leaned out version of something like this.

source: http://ultimatepaleoguide.com/paleo-diet-meal-plans/

Instead, I did the crazy diet noted above even though I was pretty much on-weight throughout fight prep and was hungry/light feeling the whole time. Then, aided by a yoga class that I took in a dubious move the morning of my fight, I weighted in at 158.8 when we all met a few hours before weigh-in to drive up. This lead to an opposite concern: that I'd be too much under weight to fight, as there are lots of official rules governing these matches, and one is apparently that there cannot be a more than 4-or-5 (we weren't sure) lb. difference between opponents. No one wanted to see the fight cancelled, and my guy L--- was weighing in right at 165.

I had brought all this food that I was psyched to eat after weigh-in. I wound up scarfing it before, to gain a couple quick pounds. I ate
--1.5 bananas (big bananas)
--1/2 of a coconut water shake from Pressed Juicery
-- a serving of plain tera's whey protein in about 10 fl. oz. of water,
-- some more water.

I weighed in at 161.4; L--- weighed in at 164.x.

Lessons: get a scale. Be strategic and thoughtful about your diet so you are not tired, dazey, and out of sorts in the days leading up to a fight. And remember: it's not some competition to be as much below your weight as possible. It's a competition to hit it exactly; the have as much mass and strength and energy as you can possibly have at the correct weight.

Handling this like a novice got in the way of my prep, for sure: I trained okay, but I could and should and would have trained better had I managed this better.

Lessons learned. Next time.