I'm going to be straight with you before you read another line.

I have never made fight weight before. This is my first camp. The only real nutrition experience I've got is tracking macros to put on muscle in high school — which is the opposite problem, and it turns out the opposite problem is a lot more fun.

So I did the only thing that made sense. I went and asked. Coaches. Fighters who've cut a dozen times. Guys who've missed and guys who never have. Then I went and read the actual research, because half of what people tell you about making weight is somebody's superstition wearing a lab coat.

Here's what I found: making weight is not a discipline problem. It's a measurement problem.

That's not a motivational line, it's a description of the failure. The guy who misses weight isn't lazy — he's the one training twice a day and first in the gym. He just never knew what he was actually eating, or what he actually weighed, or how fast he needed to be dropping. He worked hard in the dark for eight weeks and then found out on a Friday.

Now here's the part where I tell you why I get to write this.

I'm not the most experienced guy in this conversation. I'm not going to pretend to be. What I am good at — the only reason I ever finish anything — is taking something complicated and turning it into a process simple enough that I'll actually follow it on the worst day of the week. That's the skill I'm bringing. Not the miles.

I'm fighting on Monster Muay Thai in Flagstaff, Arizona — my first sanctioned fight. Every number in this issue is a number I'm running right now, this camp, on myself. I'll show you my real weights as we go.

So come along. Here's the system, start to finish, in the order you'd actually use it:

Take the twenty minutes. Do it once. You never have to panic on fight week again.

Everybody wants to start with the diet. Wrong end of the problem. You can't set a calorie target until you know what number you're eating toward and how many weeks you've got to get there.

Start with two conversations, not a calculator.

First, your coach. He's watched you spar. He knows who you handle and who handles you, and he knows what your training partners of the same size are fighting at. That's real-world data no calculator gives you. Ask him directly: what class do you see me at?

Second, the math. Once you have his answer, check it against the window below.

This is where I got confused for about two weeks, so let me save you the trouble. There isn't one number. There are three, and they do three different jobs:

1. Walk-around weight — 10–15% above your division limit.
What you sit at when you're not in camp. Not cutting, just living. The 2025 ISSN position stand on combat sports puts the ceiling at 12–15% above your class — go past that and every camp becomes a starvation project instead of a training block.

2. Fight-week weight — roughly 2–4% above your division limit.
Where the diet drops you by the last week. This is the number you carry into the final days, before any water comes off.

3. Division limit — the number on the official scale.
The gap between #2 and #3 is the acute water cut, and that's the only part of this that happens in the last 24–48 hours.

Most people mash all three into one word and then wonder why the advice contradicts itself. It doesn't. It's three numbers.

I'm fighting at 154. Here's every number in this camp:

Walk-around — 175 lb (February), 13.6% over.
Off-season. Right inside the 10–15% window.

Today — 164 lb, 6.5% over.
Mid-descent. Camp's been on about a week.

Fight week target — 158 lb, 2.6% over.
Diet's done. Water cut hasn't started.

Scale — 154 lb.
4 lb of water, the day before.

Run this on yourself right now. Your walk-around weight ÷ your division limit. If it's above 1.15, you're either moving up a class or spending your off-season, not your camp, getting closer.

My weigh-in is the day before, so I'm in that 3–5% band. My 4 lb cut is 2.5% of bodyweight. I'm deliberately under the low end for my first one.

Find your class in the left column. Walk-around is where you should be sitting when you're not in camp. Fight week is what water and gut contents are allowed to take — 4% is the ceiling, not the target.

Before any math, you need one honest number. Here's how you get it:

Weigh yourself in the morning. Fasted. Empty bladder. No clothes. Every day.

That's your true metric. Not after training. Not after dinner. Throughout the day, food and water move you around by several pounds and none of that movement means anything — it's not fat, it's contents.

Morning-fasted is the only measurement that's the same every time, and consistency is the entire point. You're not chasing today's number. You're building a trend line, and a trend only exists if the conditions never change.

Log it every morning. It takes eleven seconds. This is the highest-leverage habit in this entire issue.

Now the math. This is where a fight date becomes a weekly number.

Goal: lose about 0.7% of your bodyweight per week. For most fighters that's 1–1.5 lb. Slow enough to keep muscle, fast enough to get there.

That 0.7% isn't a vibe. Elite athletes who cut at that rate came out with more lean mass and better lifts than athletes who dropped twice as fast — same total weight lost, same fat lost. The slower rate just keeps more of what you built.

Here's the equation:

Note it's your fight-week target, not the division limit. The water cut isn't part of this math. Diet math and water math are separate jobs and mixing them is how people end up doing a 12 lb cut on a Thursday.

Mine, right now:

0.7% of 164 lb is 1.15 lb. So my camp is running at almost exactly the rate the research points at. That's not because I'm disciplined — it's because I did this division in week one and picked a class the math agreed with.

If your answer comes back at 3, 4, 5 lb a week, the math is telling you something before you've suffered for it: you picked the wrong class, or you started camp too late. Fix it now, while fixing it is still an option. That is the entire reason we do this on paper in week one.

TDEE — Total Daily Energy Expenditure — is how many calories you burn per day. It's not fixed. It moves with your training load and with everything else: walking around, a shift on your feet versus a day on the couch.

The easy way: run it through the TFL Energy Calculator — it's live and free. → https://library.thefightlife.fit/energy-calculator/

The longhand way, if you'd rather see the machinery. This is the Mifflin–St Jeor equation, which is what the position stand recommends and what my calculator runs underneath:

Mine: 25 years old, 5'10" (70 in), 164 lb.

Both roads get you to the same place. Use the calculator because it's faster and it does the macro split for you too. Do it longhand once so you know it isn't magic.

Take 500–750 calories off your TDEE. No more than that.

That's the whole instruction, and the ceiling matters more than the floor. Here's the arithmetic behind it: a pound of fat is roughly 3,500 calories, so 500/day is about 1 lb a week and 750/day is about 1.5. That lands you exactly in the 0.7%-per-week band the research points at.

Go bigger and you buy the fast version of that result — the same weight lost, none of the strength kept, and a camp where your rounds get worse every week.

Mine: 3,000 − 500 = 2,500 calories a day.

Then:

That's the loop. Set it — but don't forget it. A target you never check is just a guess with extra steps.

Three numbers. They do three different jobs, and only one of them moves.

Target: 1 g per lb of bodyweight.

A 164 lb fighter eats 164 g of protein a day. Done. The research range for a combat athlete in a cut is 1.6–2.2 g/kg, which is 0.7–1.0 g per lb — so 1 g/lb puts you at the top of it, which is exactly where you want to be while you're in a deficit.

This number does not change all camp. It's the anchor. When you're in a deficit your body is looking for something to break down; protein is what repairs the tissue you're tearing up twice a day and what keeps the muscle you spent years building. Cut this and you don't get leaner — you get smaller and weaker at the same weight.

Floor: 1.8 g per lb of bodyweight. Never go under it.

Carbs are your fuel source in high-intensity training — Muay Thai, MMA, BJJ, boxing, wrestling, and your S&C work. This is the number you actually move. Protein's locked, fat's locked, so carbs are the only variable you adjust to hit your calories.

But it's a dial with a hard stop, and the hard stop is the useful part. The position stand's line is that carbohydrate intake should not drop below 3–4 g/kg/day. That's 1.4–1.8 g per lb, and I'd hold the top of it — 1.8 — because that's a floor for a fighter training twice a day, not a sedentary person.

Here's why the floor matters more than the target: it's the thing that tells you your deficit is too aggressive. If hitting your calorie number requires dropping carbs under 1.8 g/lb, the problem isn't the carbs. It's the deficit. Back the deficit off.

My day, at 164 lb and 2,500 calories:

Protein — 1.0 g/lb, the anchor → 164 g (656 cal)
Fat — 0.4 g/lb, set and forget → 66 g (594 cal)
Carbs — whatever's left → 312 g (1,248 cal)
Total → ~2,500 calories

312 g ÷ 164 lb = 1.9 g/lb. Above the floor, with a little room. That's what a correctly-sized deficit looks like from the inside.

And here's what the floor does to your rest days. You'd think a Sunday off means dropping 400–500 calories. It doesn't. My floor — protein at 164 g, fat at the bottom of its range, carbs at 1.8 g/lb — is about 2,280 calories. So the honest rest-day number is around 2,300, not 2,200. The whole swing between a two-a-day and a day off is roughly 200 calories, because the floor stops you before you can make it bigger.

That surprised me. It's also the answer to why so many people feel wrecked by week three: they're taking a 500-calorie rest-day drop that the floor never had room for.

Now the part almost everybody gets wrong.

Most people cut carbs to nothing at the start of camp. They see the scale drop three or four pounds in a few days and think they're burning fat. They're not.

Carbs → glycogen stored in your muscle → glycogen holds water. Cut carbs, drain the glycogen, and the water goes with it. The position stand puts that at 1–2% of your bodyweight — for me, 1.6 to 3.3 lb — available purely from depleting carbs. That's the whole trick. You didn't lose fat. You lost the fuel in your muscles and the water attached to it.

Then the bill comes. A week or two later your rounds fall apart, your S&C numbers go backward, and you're tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Eight weeks out with a camp producing nothing, for a number on the scale that was never fat.

That 1–2% is real and it's useful — it's a tool for fight week, when you're depleting on purpose and know exactly what you're spending. Spend it in week one and it's gone when you need it.

Target: 0.3–0.6 g per lb of bodyweight. (This matches the position stand exactly: 0.7–1.3 g/kg.) Sit in the middle at 0.4 and leave it there.

Fat drives hormone production, and at 9 calories per gram it's the densest thing on your plate. Enough that your body works properly; not so much that it eats your budget.

Read this card off your walk-around weight — the ranges are wide because they cover a whole camp, not one day. What you actually eat today comes out of your own calorie math above. The only hard rule on the card is the floor: carbs never go under 1.8 g/lb.

Here's the honest part.

If you have never tracked, you do not know how much you're eating. Not roughly. Not "pretty close." You don't know. That's not an insult — human beings are not measurement tools. Ask a hundred people to eyeball a serving of rice and you'll get a hundred answers.

So: track for two weeks minimum.

Two weeks of logging honestly and watching the morning scale. If the scale moves the way the math said — that's your check. The food log and the scale have to agree. When they agree, your logging is accurate. When they don't, your logging is wrong, no matter how sure you feel.

Do that and you earn a calibrated eye. After that you can estimate a lot of the time. But you have to earn it first. Almost everybody who thinks they already have it has never once verified it.

The first time I actually weighed out my food, I was shocked — and not because of the portions. In high school I was eating an absurd amount trying to gain weight, so big numbers weren't new to me. It was the sauces, the oils, and the snacks. Stuff I'd never counted as food. A pour here, a handful there, and it adds up faster than you'd believe.

That's the sneaky part. You've been "eating clean" for three weeks, you've been tracking the whole time, and you're in a surplus — and all that tracking was wasted, because you were only tracking the part of the meal that looked like food.

1. Buy a food scale.
They're cheap, and a simple one is all you need. If it pairs with your phone, easier — but that's convenience, not requirement. A $15 scale does the same job as a $50 one.

2. Pick an app.
MyFitnessPal is the most common and the easiest to find food in. I'm currently using Etekcity, which pairs with a $40 scale.

3. Use weight, not volume.
Grams, not cups. Volume is where the error lives — a "cup" of anything changes with how you packed it. Weight is exact. And pick one state and stay in it: weigh raw and log raw. Cooking changes water content, not calories, so as long as you're consistent your numbers stop drifting.

4. Build a repeat meal library.
This is the step that makes tracking survivable. Log a meal once, correctly, and save it. Then it's one button instead of the entire process. Everybody who quits tracking quits because they were re-entering every ingredient daily like a data-entry job. Build the library in week one and it takes ninety seconds a day.

Being busy is the real obstacle, and it's the reason most people never start. Full-time work. Kids. A partner who'd like to see you. A commute, a second job, a house that doesn't clean itself — none of it stops because you signed a fight contract. And then some newsletter tells you to go weigh your rice.

I'm not going to pretend I'm carrying all of that. I don't have kids. What I do have is a full-time job at the fire department — 24-hour shifts, sleep I don't get to schedule, and meals I have to plan around a tone-out that could come at any minute. If you're stacking more on top of that than I am, then the answer isn't more discipline. It's a smaller system.

Here's mine at the firehouse: I eat mostly the same things. That sounds boring and it isn't, because I picked food I actually like. The key is that those meals are saved in my app. Same breakfast, same lunch, two taps. Variety costs me more than it gives me right now, so I spend it somewhere else.

That's the move if your life is full. Don't build a plan with fourteen different meals in it. Build four you'd eat on your worst day, log them once, and repeat them. Tracking stops being a project and becomes a habit that fits in the cracks.

The fallback: if the scale isn't there — traveling, somebody's house, eating out — use the hand-portion method. Palm, fist, cupped hand, thumb. Fair warning, though: it's only as good as your eye, and if your eye isn't calibrated yet it will walk you straight off a cliff. Use it as a backup after your two weeks, not instead of them.

You've got your calories and your three macro numbers. Last piece is arranging them across the day. Four things, in this order of importance:

Here's the whole day laid out three ways — one session, two sessions, and a rest day. Same skeleton, same protein spacing. Only the carbs move.

Now the food. Same ingredient list, three different days — so you can see that "eating for a cut" isn't a special diet, it's a short shopping list arranged on purpose.

Portions are deliberately not on this table. Your calories and your macros set them — this is the format, the numbers are yours.

Look at what that list actually is: ground meat, starch, frozen vegetables, eggs, yogurt. Cheap, fast, repeatable — which is the whole point. Food you can cook when you're exhausted is food you'll actually eat. The perfect meal plan you abandon in week three loses to the boring one you run for eight weeks straight.

So where am I in all this?

Back in February I was walking around about 175. Today I'm sitting comfortably at 164 — and comfortably is the word I mean, because it hasn't been miserable. The real camp and the fight cut have only been fully on for about a week, and I'm on track. I'll keep you posted on how the energy holds and how training goes as the number keeps coming down.

None of this is complicated. That's what I want you to take from it.

Pick a class you can actually make. Weigh yourself the same way every morning. Divide the pounds by the weeks. Take 500–750 calories off, not more. Anchor your protein at 1 g/lb, set your fat and leave it, and move your carbs — but never under the floor. Weigh your food for two weeks so you finally know what you're eating. Weigh the oil.

That's the whole system. It's not a secret and it's not hard. It's a handful of numbers, run in order, starting in week one instead of week seven.

The guys who miss weight aren't the guys who didn't want it badly enough. They're the guys who never did the math.

I'm doing the math in public this camp, and I'll show you the whole thing — what worked, what I got wrong, and what the scale says on October 9th. If you want to follow it into my first fight, you're already in the right place. And if somebody sent you this, the signup's below.

One more thing: I've got a site with every template, guide and tool in this issue — the calculator, the macro sheets, the supplement stack builder, all of it. It's free. → https://library.thefightlife.fit/

I'll see you next week. Have fun, be safe, don't die.

— Dylan