By Oleksandr Foka — sports nutritionist. Has worked in world title camps with Oleksandr Usyk, Oleksandr Gvozdyk, Denys Berinchyk, Vladyslav Sirenko, Murodjon Ahmadaliev, Israil Madrimov, Sergiy Bogachuk, Sabirzhan Akkalykov and Abylaikhan Zhussupov.
Almost every food question a fighter asks gets answered by somebody assuming he competes at whatever he weighs. That assumption is wrong, and it flips several of the usual answers.
Why the usual advice does not transfer
General nutrition ranks foods by how healthy they are. A fighter has to rank them by something else: what they do to a number on a scale at a specific hour on a specific day, and what they do to performance 18 hours later.
Those two rankings disagree more often than people expect.
The clearest example
Brown rice is better than white by every general standard. More fibre, slower release, more micronutrients.
In the final days before a weigh-in that fibre is gut content, and gut content is weight you carry onto the scale. White rice becomes the correct answer, for exactly the reason it is usually the worse one.
The same reversal happens with vegetables, with wholegrains, with beans and with fruit. Not because those foods are bad, but because the question changed.
How these pages are structured
Each food gets assessed against four things rather than one.
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|
| Where it belongs in camp | Most of the year, this is ordinary nutrition and the general answer usually holds |
| What it does during a descent | Satiety, volume and how well it survives an energy deficit |
| Fight week and the last 3 days | Fibre, residue and water retention, which is where the answers invert |
| After the scale and on fight day | Absorption speed and gastric emptying, which decide whether it is fuel or ballast |
Where a food has an anti-doping angle, it gets one. Most do not. A few genuinely do, and those are the ones nobody warns you about.
Where to start
If you are in ordinary camp, the general principles in how many calories a fighter needs and hard days and rest days matter more than any individual food.
If you are inside the final week, what low residue actually means on a plate is the page that governs everything here.
And if you are in the hours after a weigh-in, the refuelling protocol decides the order, and these pages only tell you what to put in it.
The foods
Protein
Tofu: the hormone question is already answered
Forty-one studies, no effect at any dose. And the one plant protein that survives fight week.
Protein
Beans and lentils: tinned beats dried
The gas-forming carbohydrates are water soluble, which makes the processed version the gentler one.
Carbohydrate
Quinoa: a better grain, not a protein source
Eight grams per cooked cup. Complete and not sufficient, and wrong in the final days for two reasons.
Carbohydrate
Honey: the liver glycogen nobody talks about
Fructose helps one glycogen store and not the other. And table sugar does the same job.
Carbohydrate
Bread: wholemeal is barely better than white
A few points apart, both high. What actually changes the number is fermentation, not the flour.
Carbohydrate
Pasta: the low-GI carbohydrate nobody believes is low-GI
Wholewheat buys almost no glycaemic advantage. White is still right in the final days, for a different reason.
Carbohydrate
Rice: white or brown depends on the week
The food where the general answer and the fighter's answer point in opposite directions, and why.
Carbohydrate
Oats: the breakfast that turns on you
The best breakfast in camp and one of the worst in the final days. Beta-glucan holds water.
Protein
Eggs: the protein that works in every phase
Most foods have a week where they become wrong. Eggs largely do not, and the reason matters.
Vegetables
Leafy greens: the same nitrate, working for you this time
It improved judo-specific work and lactate, and did nothing for jump height or grip. Mouthwash abolishes it.
Vegetables
Broccoli and the cabbage family: two gases, two mechanisms
The volume and the smell come from different compounds, and both leave in the cooking water.
Drinks
Sweeteners: the trials and the observations disagree
In fight week the sweetener is not the issue. The fluid is, and the sugar alcohols are.
Drinks
What actually keeps fluid in: the sports drink does not
Milk and oral rehydration solution beat water. The sports drink performed no differently from water at all.
Other
Sauces: one tablespoon of fish sauce is 1,390 mg of sodium
A calorie problem for 8 weeks and a sodium problem for 4 days, from different bottles.
Other
Salt: the most managed variable in fight week
Restriction does not work alone. It primes the reload, and half the protocol is worse than none.
Fats
Olive oil: the largest uncounted number in your kitchen
A tablespoon is 120 calories and nobody measures it. Everything else matters less than that.
Fats
Avocado: classified as fruit, behaves as fat
One avocado is 227 calories, and it increases what you absorb from everything else on the plate.
Fats
Nuts: the label overstates whole almonds by a quarter
Whole nuts deliver fewer calories than the packet says. Nut butter delivers exactly what it says.
Fruit
Apples: they put the fibre back in the juice and it still did not work
Same calories, same fibre, three forms, 150 calories difference at the next meal. Structure beats content.
Fruit
Citrus: the fruit does one job and the capsule does another
Firm evidence for people under heavy exertion, and two risks that peak in the week it is most tempting.
Other
Fast food: wrong all year, defensible in one specific window
The choice on the road is not between fast food and an ideal meal. It is between fast food and nothing.
Other
Chocolate: the percentage does not tell you what is inside
Dutch processing destroys the compound you buy it for, and organic tested worse for heavy metals.
Fruit
Berries: the recovery effect and the adaptation question
Tart cherry blunts inflammation, and inflammation is partly how you adapt. That decides when to use it.
Fruit
Watermelon: right food, wrong reason
The citrulline claim needs a kilogram. The real value is water without fibre, and the real caution is nitrate.
Fruit
Dried fruit: best thing in your bag, worst thing in fight week
Removing the water concentrates everything. The sugar, which is the point, and the fibre, which is not.
Fruit
Bananas: useful, and not for the reason people think
The cramp story does not hold up. What it actually gives you is fast carbohydrate with no preparation.
Carbohydrate
Corn and popcorn: two different foods, one name
Three cups of air-popped popcorn is 93 calories. Nothing else gives you that much volume for that little.
Carbohydrate
Potatoes: the carbohydrate nobody plans around
Among the most filling foods per calorie, and the skin decides which week it belongs in.
Protein
Tuna: the protein that gets mistaken for a fish
Oil-packed carries less omega-3 than water-packed, not more. And light against white governs the mercury.
Protein
Oily fish: the only food here with a brain argument
Canned tuna carries a sixth of what a sardine does. Most people eating fish for omega-3 have the wrong fish.
Protein
White fish: the best protein-to-calorie ratio you can buy
Around 87 percent of cod calories come from protein, and nothing else clears the gut as fast.
Protein
Turkey: chicken has more tryptophan, and the mechanism is backwards
Protein when you need to be sharp, carbohydrate when you need to sleep. The rest is myth.
Protein
Chicken: the default protein nobody thinks about
It survives every phase. The plan leaks on what gets added to make dry breast edible.
Protein
Red meat: best source of two things, worst timing
Haem iron and creatine in a form nothing else matches, and the slowest thing to clear before a scale.
Protein
Greek yoghurt: the strain in the study is not the one in your pot
The athlete probiotic evidence is real and strain-specific, which is why it does not transfer to the shelf.
Protein
Cottage cheese: excellent protein, and a sodium problem
Similar protein to Greek yoghurt, roughly 8 times the sodium. In one week that matters.
Protein
Dairy: cut for the wrong reasons, kept for the wrong week
The mucus story does not hold up. Lactose intolerance is real. Different problems, different answers.
Drinks
Green tea: the drink and the extract are different products
The fat oxidation effect holds at moderate intensity and is lost at the intensities you actually train at.
Drinks
Coffee: the dose you cannot know
Caffeine content swings several-fold between cups, which makes coffee a poor delivery method.
More foods are being added. If there is one you want covered, the email address below reaches me.
Who wrote this
Oleksandr Foka is a sports nutritionist with over a decade in professional sport. He wrestled freestyle from the age of 4 until he was 22, competing as a medallist and champion at Ukrainian and international level, and has worked with amateur boxers since 2017, including champions and medallists at world championships. He has worked in world title camps in boxing with Oleksandr Usyk, Oleksandr Gvozdyk, Denys Berinchyk, Vladyslav Sirenko, Murodjon Ahmadaliev, Israil Madrimov, Sergiy Bogachuk, Sabirzhan Akkalykov and Abylaikhan Zhussupov, and with the Kazakhstan national boxing team and Kazakhstan judo athletes. He currently works on the WTA tour.
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