Miesha Tate knows from personal experience that Kayla Harrison’s biggest obstacle in the UFC may not be the level of competition but rather the battle she’s having with her own body to consistently get down to 135 pounds.
After previously competing at lightweight and featherweight for her entire career, Harrison made a successful debut at bantamweight with a dominant submission win over Holly Holm at UFC 300. She’ll look to do it again at UFC 307 on Saturday but Tate understands that the whole process can be arduous after she endured her own extreme weight cut back in 2022.
“I tried that at 125,” Tate said on MMA Today. “It didn’t work out for me. It really was hard on my body and it took me probably a year to recover from doing that.
Tate’s one and only fight at flyweight in the UFC ended in a lopsided loss to Lauren Murphy but it turns out the performance was the least of her worries afterward.
Realizing that it was a mistake making that move to 125 pounds, Tate had to work almost as hard to get her body back to normal again after enduring the months long process to shed muscle off her body.
“It was brutal,” Tate said. “First of all, I think all my hormone levels were off — well, I know that they were [off]. As a female you get irregular cycles and things like that when you cut your weight or you lose your cycle. For me, I lost it for a while.
“Then it was like hormonally it’s one of those things that you are like “OK, I messed up.’ I think a lot of fighters experience this, too, especially female fighters, the irregular hormones. The feeling of tiredness, exhaustion and hunger. Even when I could eat and I was full, my body was like you’re still hungry. No, like I’m full. No, I’m still hungry. It’s a weird internal battle that was going on for me.”
Tate says her eating habits in particular took a huge hit after it sounds like she was almost forced to go on a starvation diet to maintain her weight while still cutting down to 125 pounds.
The after effects of the whole ordeal continued to haunt her long after she stepped foot on the scale for that ill-fated attempt to compete at flyweight.
“My relationship with food changed from depriving myself for so long,” Tate said. “It took me about six months probably to get down that lean because I had to lose muscle. So you have to do it over a long period of time. Like forever it felt of calorie depravation. When you do that, then you’re body’s like when you can eat it’s like I want to eat everything and when am I going to stop being hungry? I’m not even hungry but mentally I’m still hungry.
“It took me a long time. It took me a really long time to get things kind of leveled out.”
Obviously, Tate can’t say for certain how Harrison handles that long term but she expects it’s not going to be good for anybody to continuously go through those brutal weight cuts.
“I wonder with her being just a big, strong athletic woman, who truly isn’t a 135’er, but she’s managed to do it through diligence and forcing her body to make that weight but is it healthy for her?” Tate said. “Is it good for her? Probably not. In the long run, I think it will wear on her.”
