Cutting weight for a tourny

If you're weighing in the morning of, I wouldn't recommend doing any crash dieting or dehydration to make weight. You might be able to get down to 155 doing those things, but you'll feel pretty weak. If you can't weigh-in the day before, I would suggest not cutting at all with only 3 weeks to do it. Maybe just eat a lot and try to go in as big as you can?

But maybe you weigh-in the day before, so with some dieting and some sauna time, you might be able to make it.

Here is how I get my weight down (and I always go in feeling strong and energetic):

1) High protein/Low carbs:
This isn't no carbs, just low carbs. I only eat carbs immediately before and immediately following a work out. So it's more about timing your carbs than eliminating them from your diet because your body needs carbs for energy. The trick is to supply them when you're sure that they will be burned up and to limit ingesting them when they might not be used and turned to fat.

Other than that, it's a lot of protein (meat, fish), vegetables, and fresh fruit. Yes, fruit has sugar in it, but the benefits outweigh any glucose your body might build up from fruit alone.

2) Fats and Oils
Some fats are good for you. So I make sure to mix in peanuts, fish oil, flax seed oil, and olive oil. I take fish oil pills and flax seed pills (pretty easy to find at any store that carries health food products), and I eat olive oil with my meats and my salads.

3) Soft Foods
In the last 2 weeks or so, I switch my diet over to soft foods. I steal eat some solid meats and vegetables, but I try get a lot of my nutrition from foods like yogurt, cottage cheese, bananas, protein shakes, etc. The soft foods are easier for your body to digest, so they pass through your body quicker, which plays directly into part 4.

4) System Flush
3 weeks before my weigh in I begin upping my fiber using a product like Metamucil (sp?). I use the individual packets, and for 2 weeks I take one packet a day. In the last week before the weigh in I take 3 packets a day. The high fiber helps to clean your system out, so there's not a lot of excess waste weighing you down. I lost about 4 pounds doing this, but I've heard some larger folks losing as much as 9 pounds by taking fiber supplements alone.

With the fiber, I drink lots and lots of water. While I'm always aiming to stay hydrated, I aim to drink about 2 gallons of water a day in the last week before the weigh in. This also helps to clean your system and gets rid of a lot of toxins lingering your bladder.

That's the condensed version. I really suggest checking out Nutrition for Grapplers (a great book on dieting specifically for combat athletes).

Note: I followed a version of this plan for my latest tournament, but traveling made it difficult for me to eat super clean until the last week before the weigh-ins (I was eating clean as best I could, but it was difficult to time the carbs as well as I would have liked). So, on Monday morning I weighed 168 pounds. I ate low carb meals, soft foods, drank a lot of water, and took a lot of fiber. I weighed 161.6 the morning of the weigh-in (stopped eating or drinking at 7:30pm the night before). I hit the sauna for a bit, got down to 159.6 (cut off was 159.9), weighed in, and by the morning of my matches I was back to 170. I felt strong and energetic.