Because sometimes eating can make you angry too.

Summary:

Doing this diet can be a fun, satisfying, healthy way to live. There are a lot of great things about the Warrior Diet and it’s ideas, from tuning up your mental warrior to saving time on meal preparation. But this doesn’t make it useful to an amateur or pro mixed martial artist.

If you haven’t heard of the Warrior Diet (WD), it is essentially this: you eat only one meal a day (at night) avoid processed foods like the plague, and let warrior essence permeate your body until all your enemies lie defeated under your gladiator physique. Or at least something like that.

The Diet Specifics

As I mentioned, the basic idea of the diet is to have a controlled fast during the day and eat one big meal at night. During your evening meal, you can eat as much as you want, even if it would be more than you would consume in 3 regular meals.

For this meal, a few “rules” are to be kept.

• Eat natural, unprocessed foods.  If it came in a package and has a mile-long list of ingredients (high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated…) , thou shalt not eat it.
• Less aggressive tastes first. Start with uncooked fruits and veggies, and move to more aggressive tastes like salty, beefy, etc.
• Have a lot of variety. Include as many aromas, colors, textures, and tastes in a meal as possible.
• Stop eating when you are full – or – when you become more thirsty than hungry.

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During the day, you can eat a little bit – fresh squeezed fruit and vegetable juices, raw nuts, low glycemic index fruits, lean protein – but no pasta/bread type carbs. Also, you should drink lots of water.

If you are very active, the diet makes some concessions and allows some eating post workout.

Outside of these eating based rules, the WD has several themes which run along side the dietary advise.

In general, live more naturally. Eat local, fresh, seasonal foods.

Enjoy what you eat and how you eat. Eat with pleasurable company, have lively discussion and laughter during and after the meal.

Let hunger be a positive thing. After eating like a warrior for a while, you’ll have a certain mastery over food, hunger, and desires. In the day time, stay active, sharp and “hungry for life”.

Workout in short, intense bursts. Make sure exercises build functional strength.

Be a warrior. Insert mental images of the movie 300 here.

Of course, this is just an overview. The book make a lot of claims and makes a lot of explanations. Ori’s scientific reasoning is sound in some places, and suspect in others.  There are numerous references to ancient Roman and Spartan lifestyles; some times the history reading is a bit like hero worship, but interesting nonetheless. You’ll have to sort out it for yourself.

Personal Experience

I originally read Warrior Diet, by Ori Hofmekler, about 4 years ago and got sucked into the warrior idealism that the book exudes. Certainly, I am not a nutritionist, but I have diligently lived the WD for 6 straight months, as well as lived a modified WD for over a year, so I know what it does to my body. I’ve been reading different forums and diet logs, and all I can say is that your mileage may vary.

Some bodies work well with the whole under eating during the day/overeating at night gig, some people respond poorly. For me, the WD diet worked pretty well on many fronts. The diet works for the author, Ori, as you can tell that he’s fairly ripped.

For me, it the diet was a good lifestyle. You only have to eat once a day – which is a huge time saver – and by the time you get to dinner you are very hungry, which means food tastes really good. By cutting out processed, unnatural foods (overly sweet and salty preservatives muck up your perceptions) I started to have a much more acute sense of taste. I could taste everything I ate at a deeper level, for instance I began noticing the strong sweetness in carrots.  As a side effect, junk foods didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t crave them or even like them when I did eat them (very infrequently, I might add).

I loved eating this way – my food tasted better and I felt satisfied every day. I suspect that you get a serotonin boost at night when you eat until you’re full.

The first little while, hunger pains were pretty tough in the afternoon.  Part of it was a psychological addiction to food, part was a biological balancing act of blood sugars.  The WD says you should eat a little bit to combat the hunger pains, but I wanted the full warrior feeling. No pain no gain.  After a while, my body adapted and the cringing pain of hunger was all but gone. To this day, I still don’t get mood/energy swings when I don’t eat.

As a general rule, I used to get sleepy after lunch.  By fasting, I avoided the afternoon grogginess. While on the WD, I had a lot more energy during the day and slept pretty well at night.

The warrior diet did funky things to my sex drive too. In general, in made me more aggressive and horny – but not in that uncontrolled high school type of way.  Maybe it was all in my mind, but I felt more masculine and sharp. I didn’t “perform” any differently physically, but there was definitely a marked difference in my mental state.

In terms of athletic performance, I didn’t notice any significant change. I was a fit young man before I started the WD, so I didn’t look to the warrior lifestyle to give me a sixpack of abs. In fact, the first few weeks I gained a few pounds of fat. If I had to guess, it was due to increased cortisol levels associated with not drinking enough water. The diet says to drink a lot of water, but I didn’t really start drinking enough till week 3. Eventually, that fat came off.

Afterthoughts

If you’d like to try the warrior diet, I say go for it.  If you are overweight, I’d guess that you’d lose weight because most people have trouble packing in 2,000 calories in one meal if the evening foods are natural and healthy.

However, if you’re looking to increase your MMA performance I just don’t see the Warrior Diet facilitating that.  After reading up quite a bit on Billy Rush, MMA nutritionist superstar, I’m sold on the 6 small meals a day plan for fighters. When you’re really into MMA, you probably have more than one workout a day. With those workouts, you have optimal windows of nutrient uptake and serious needs of proper recovery.  Your most important meal of the day is the post-workout recovery meal, second only to the pre-workout mini-meal.

Bottom line: The pro’s of daily fasting just don’t out-weigh the gains you could be making by eating more frequently, in time with your workouts.

If you have any questions, let me know or you can crawl the WD forums.