With his move to lightweight, former featherweight champion Ilia Topuria is looking forward to a safer, less horrific weight cut.
The UFC’s new star is growing in popularity and size, which was why he decided to stop torturing himself to make 145 pounds and dropped the belt (or was stripped). In a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Topuria described just how bad things got.
“You have to train as a motherf—ker all the time, and you have like eight hundred calories in your body, and you burn four thousand calories,” he explained. “That f—ks with your mind. You don’t feel happiness. You feel stressed, depressed. You don’t find the happiness in anything. They could bring you all the money in the world, but you don’t give a f—k at that moment about anything material.”
“My health is the most important thing in in in my life,” Topuria said of the final weight cut push. “You you can have everything in in this life, but if you are not healthy, you don’t have anything … You sometimes feel that you’re really gonna die. I wasn’t able to sleep in forty eight hours at all because I was so dehydrated. My body was so skinny.”
It wasn’t always that way. Topuria had more fun with the cut back in 2020 when he first arrived in the UFC. There’s footage of “La Leyenda” drinking wine the night before weigh-ins as part of his process to dehydrate.
“I did it twice in my career,” he said of the weight cut wine binge. “It was once in Las Vegas, I was fighting with Damon Jackson. I had like [13 pounds] or something like that to cut. The guy that was taking care of my nutrition told me, ‘Drink wine. Drink half a bottle of wine. I’m like, ‘Are you sure?’ He’s like, ‘Yes, because if you drink a liter of wine you’re gonna wake up the next day, if you don’t put anything else in your body, with two liters less. The alcohol is going to procreate the dehydration.’”
“I did it, and it works,” Topuria said.
“After that I did it in my next fight. But then I was like, ‘Waugh, I don’t feel good!’ It’s fun because everyone is almost dying that night, I was partying with my team. So skinny, drinking wine. I’m like, ‘What the f—k are we doing?’”
It’s still unclear when Topuria’s next weight cut will happen as UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev waits to see who wins UFC 315’s welterweight title bout between Belal Muhammad and Jack Della Maddalena. If Jack Della wins, Makhachev would move up and we could see Topuria fight someone for the vacant strap.
If not … well, Team Mak has been talking like they aren’t interested in fighting Ilia, so things could get complicated.
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
