Former UFC Champion Explains Starvation and Abstinence to Unleash the Caveman Mindset

Former two-division UFC champion recalled the days when he’d have to starve himself ahead of a fight.

Becoming a mixed martial artist is no easy task. Aside from the years of dedication, endless hours of training, and the dietary discipline necessary to succeed, there also comes the task of making weight which often sees fighters significantly cutting down their food intake and dehydrating themselves to the point of exhaustion just before a fight.

Some fighters struggle so severely that they wind up fainting while trying to climb on or off the scale.

Taking away ‘the pleasures of life’ turned the UFC Hall of Famer into a different man

During a recent episode of his Funky and The Champ podcast with Ben Askren, ‘DC’ looked back on some of his more difficult weight cuts and how the lack of food and abstinence from intimacy would make him feel like someone straight out of the Paleolithic era.

“I tried to recreate that caveman sh*t in me every fight,” Cormier began. “Listen, I’m abstaining from sex for like a month, and then don’t eat like, literally don’t eat. So, main event usually walks out at 10 o’clock at night. Don’t eat past 2 PM in the afternoon. Starving. Like, literally just starving. Because when you’re hungry, right, your mind goes to a place. Like, if I had to go and kill something to eat right now, I would.

And obviously, we’re not at that level of hunger, but it’s like if I need to go… Yes, right. You can put yourself almost in a caveman mindset, to where you’re like taking all the—the—the pleasures of life that we as men love so much—food, you know, women, those things—you take it away from yourself.

And then by the time you get in there with this dude, you’re like, “Yo, you’re the reason that I didn’t get to do this. You’re the reason that I’m hungry.” Seriously.”

Fortunately, those days are long gone for the former champ-champ.