For MMA's few committed vegans, dietary challenges are worth the rewards

Alex Caceres

Thanksgiving can be a rough time to be a pro fighter – especially if you happen to have a fight looming.

The threat of a looming weight cut has ruined many a holiday feast for many fighters, but one small group thinks it’s figured out something important about diet and lifestyle, and gorging on turkey and heavy gravy is no longer even a question.

That group would be MMA’s small contingent of committed vegans, like UFC bantamweight Alex Caceres. There was a time shortly after he began drifting toward becoming a full vegan when he’d deviate from the diet with a post-fight cheat meal, he said, once all the hard work was done and he figured there’d be no harm in falling off the vegan wagon for a brief break.

“But it came to a point where I had to stop doing those cheat meals,” Caceres told MMAjunkie before his most recent bout in September. “They made me feel like a hypocrite, in every sense of the word. Around the beginning of this year I started going full vegan, and I’d have to say maybe 95 percent raw vegan. Like, my cheat meals would be basically cooked vegan meals, and I’d feel guilty about that.”

On the fighter diet spectrum, Caceres is on an extreme end, but he’s not totally alone. As fighters look to clean up their diets, some are trying out more and more restrictive food plans in the interest of turning their bodies into well-functioning machines.

UFC fighters Nick and Nate Diaz have, in the past, described living on diets that are essentially pescetarian. Former Strikeforce champ and current WSOF welterweight Jake Shields has been a vegetarian all his life, with occasional forays into veganism. Retired UFC lightweight Mac Danzig is perhaps the most famous example, especially for fans who recall him grumbling about castmates on ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ eating his hummus when he wasn’t around.

For Danzig, who said he went full vegan in 2004, it was a decision he made more for ethical reasons than athletic ones.

“My thought was always, well, if it doesn’t hinder my health, then I want to do it,” Danzig said. “The reason I didn’t implement it sooner was because I believed what everybody said. What everyone tells you is this stuff like, ‘You need a gram of protein for every pound of body weight,’ just this bodybuilding-style approach to nutrition that has invaded every other sport. That bodybuilding culture and their idea of what is a healthy diet has largely contaminated the culture of health for athletes in general.”

Danzig first tried it after reading a food blog written by a local trainer, he said. The man seemed strong and athletic enough, and his meal plan didn’t seem so different from what Danzig was already doing, albeit without the chicken and the fish that Danzig was still enjoying on occasion. As far as the difference it made in his physical performance, that was relatively subtle.

“The main thing I noticed was my recovery between workouts was much faster,” Danzig said. “My digestion was so much better, and I felt ready to go for workout number two or three on any given day. When I was eating more animal products, I felt more sluggish and it took me more time to digest. Other than that, to be honest, I felt pretty much the same. I felt a little lighter, maybe, but mostly it was that I didn’t feel bad, like everyone told me I would.”

That sentiment was echoed by Shields, who grew up vegetarian and has dabbled with vegan diets, but found them difficult to maintain at times.

“I feel like I can train more than most people, and I think I have a lot of energy, but I’ve never eaten meat so there’s really nothing to compare it to,” Shields said. “But I do feel like I have more energy than most fighters I know. People talk about overtraining and things like that, but I’m 35 and I don’t feel like I’m getting any older.”

But talk to lifestyle and weight-management guru Mike Dolce, who’s built custom diets for dozens of pro fighters – including some who claimed to be vegan, but had to supplement their diets with eggs or fish “because their bodies began breaking down during training camps” – and he’ll tell you that there are drawbacks and limitations to trying to maintain a pro athlete’s lifestyle and workout regimen with a vegan’s restrictive meal plan.

“Ethically, morally, in terms of social responsibility, I completely understand it, and I respect every human’s personalized approach to that,” Dolce said. “That being said, for combat athletes, it makes your preparation and lifestyle, which is already difficult, even more difficult. To properly live as a vegan is one of the most difficult and time-invasive lifestyles you can have as an athlete. It’s very hard to get all the nutrition you need when you’re grinding your body through two grueling training sessions a day, six days a week, using only plant-based sources. It’s especially difficult when you talk about how to properly source these plant-based products, which can get a lot harder depending on where you’re located.”

The latter point is a valid one, according to both Shields and Danzig, who both live in California, where they’re among vegan friends. In Los Angeles, where Danzig lives, as well as in the Bay Area, where Shields makes his home, there are no shortage of stores and restaurants catering to vegetarians and vegans alike.

“But any time that I went and traveled and I’d find myself in some place like Iowa or Nebraska, it was a real challenge,” Danzig said. “Fortunately, there are more and more stores that are popping up that carry items catering to this lifestyle, but living in L.A. you get spoiled. There are so many stores and restaurants, and even restaurants that aren’t vegan restaurants, they all at least know what that word means now and have something on the menu for you.”

For most vegans though, their diets mean that they end up doing almost all their own meal preparation, with relatively few dinners out and lots of time and energy devoted to filling their stomachs.

That, said Dolce, is where things really get difficult for fighters. Not only does it take up so much of their daily lives, it can also be “cost-prohibitive” to eat nothing but fresh, organically-grown food. That might be just one reason the lifestyle hasn’t taken off among fighters, he theorized.

“How many vegans can you point to in the UFC that have had that high-level success?” Dolce said. “I can’t point to any, and I’m not saying that to bash it. I think there are great components to the lifestyle. I lived as a vegan for three months, did that for two years in a row, and I felt healthy, but my grocery bill damn near doubled. I was spending maybe four hours a day on stuff like meal prep and grocery shopping. I had to go to the grocery store almost every day. Your food is constantly going bad because it has to be fresh. It was hard, especially for a guy like me who’s eating 3,000 calories a day. I lost a lot of body weight, but I can’t say I really performed any better.”

But then, for the few truly vegan fighters, performance isn’t necessarily the point. Caceres insisted that he’s actually added some muscle mass while getting lighter overall since the change, but also pointed out that none of his dietary and lifestyle decisions were prompted by concerns about his athletic performance.

“It doesn’t make you a more skillful fighter,” Caceres said. “You’ve got to train for that. But what it has done is given me more energy and made me more enthusiastic about training. People can argue different arguments about that. There are plenty of fighters that are incredibly great that eat meat, or eat conventionally, or eat whatever the hell they want. It has nothing to do with fighting. To me it’s just health and nutrition and well-being and a lifestyle. I haven’t been to the hospital in the last three years. I haven’t been sick in the last three years. There’s got to be something with that.”

According to Danzig, these are bigger questions that how best to fuel an athlete’s body. They’re questions about how best to live as a modern human, and they’re also questions that each person has to answer for his or herself.

“I feel like there’s a certain amount of responsibility that comes with saying, ‘Hey, we are the dominant species and we’ve taken over,’” Danzig said. “Now, I can’t control other people and I don’t want to control other people. The last thing I want to do is run around waving the vegan flag and telling everybody that they need to do what I do. I don’t like that. But who can I control? I can control what I do and what I buy or don’t buy and eat or don’t eat. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s my drop in the bucket.”