What to eat when cutting weight

The short answer, before the evidence

Build the plate around a protein-dense centre, give volume to foods that carry water and fibre, and treat fat and sauces as the place where energy hides. That is the whole of the defensible advice, and it comes from four properties that have been measured — protein per calorie, energy density, water and fibre content, and gastric emptying — rather than from any list of foods.

Everything after this section is the evidence behind those four properties, the conditions attached to each, and the point at which each one stops applying. The last of those matters most: the food choices that serve an athlete through most of a camp are not the food choices that serve them in the final days before a weigh-in, and in at least one case — fibre — the direction of the advice reverses outright.

Protein per calorie: the one criterion with trials behind it

Protein density is the criterion with the most direct experimental support, and the mechanism is retention rather than loss. Two randomised trials fed different protein intakes at the same energy deficit and found different body-composition outcomes.

In 20 young, healthy, resistance-trained athletes held at 60% of habitual energy intake for two weeks, lean body mass fell by 1.6 ± 0.3 kg in the control arm (about 1.0 g protein per kg per day) against 0.3 ± 0.3 kg in the high-protein arm (about 2.3 g per kg per day), P = 0.006 (Mettler, Mitchell and Tipton, Med Sci Sports Exerc 2010). Fat loss and most performance measures did not differ between the arms.

The same trial found two things the protein argument does not usually mention. The high-protein group also lost less total weight — 1.5 ± 0.3 kg against 3.0 ± 0.4 kg over the two weeks, P = 0.036 — and they reported higher fatigue and more "worse than normal" days on the Daily Analysis of Life Demands for Athletes. For a fighter, neither is a footnote. Losing half as much total mass is the opposite of what someone with a weigh-in date is trying to do, and a fortnight of elevated fatigue ratings during a hard camp is a cost, not a rounding error. The honest reading is that the plate changed what was lost, and that the trade was not free in either direction.

The other trial people reach for is Longland 2016, and it needs its cohort stated in the same breath as its numbers. In 40 overweight young men who were not regular resistance trainers, on a deficit of about 40% below estimated requirements with every meal provided and six training sessions a week, the 2.4 g per kg per day arm gained 1.2 ± 1.0 kg of lean mass and lost 4.8 ± 1.6 kg of fat, while the 1.2 g per kg per day arm gained 0.1 ± 1.0 kg of lean mass and lost 3.5 ± 1.4 kg of fat (Am J Clin Nutr 2016). Performance measures improved similarly in both arms.

That is a real result and it is not a result about fighters. Untrained overweight men starting a supervised programme with all food supplied have the largest possible room to gain lean mass; a trained competitor eight weeks into camp does not. Quoting "+1.2 kg of lean mass on a 40% deficit" without the cohort is the single most common misuse of this paper. The transferable finding is directional — at a fixed deficit, higher protein intakes were associated with better lean-mass outcomes — not numerical.

What this means at the plate is narrow and useful: when the calorie budget is fixed, foods that deliver more protein per calorie do more work than foods that do not. Lean meat, fish, eggs, dairy and legumes carry that ratio; most of what sits around them does not. The daily gram targets are a separate question and belong with protein during a weight cut.

Protein quality: which foods clear the bar in an ordinary portion

The ISSN position stand on protein and exercise gives a per-meal target rather than a list of foods, and the list falls out of it. The stand puts an acute dose at "0.25 g of a high-quality protein per kg of body weight, or an absolute dose of 20–40 g", says acute doses "should strive to contain 700–3000 mg of leucine and/or a higher relative leucine content" alongside a balanced array of essential amino acids, and notes that "rapidly digested proteins that contain high proportions of essential amino acids (EAAs) and adequate leucine, are most effective in stimulating MPS" (Jäger et al., J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2017).

In practice that separates foods into two groups. Dairy, eggs, meat and fish reach that leucine content in portions a person would ordinarily serve. Most single plant sources need either a noticeably larger portion or combination with another source to get there. That is a statement about portion size, not about whether plant proteins work; it changes what the plate looks like, not whether the athlete can eat that way.

We are not printing a leucine content per food. No per-food leucine table was verified against a primary source for this article, and a number like "a chicken breast contains 2.5 g of leucine" depends entirely on the size of the breast. The threshold is citable; the per-food arithmetic is not, and it is the kind of number that gets copied onwards without its assumptions.

The stand also says protein "should ideally be evenly distributed, every 3–4 h, across the day". That is a muscle-protein-synthesis argument, and it is worth separating from the metabolic-rate argument that people usually attach to it — see the section on meal frequency below, where that second argument does not survive.

Energy density and volume: why the same calories feel different

Lowering the energy density of a meal reduced how much people went on to eat, in a laboratory. In a randomised crossover of 42 women eating lunch in the lab once a week for seven weeks, a low-energy-density first course cut total meal energy intake by 7% at the small portion and 12% at the large, while a high-energy-density first course raised it by 8% and 17% (Rolls, Roe and Meengs, J Am Diet Assoc 2004). The authors' conclusion: "Eating a low-energy-dense first course enhances satiety and reduces meal energy intake."

The conditions matter. These were non-athlete women, single laboratory meals, no energy deficit, no training load. The finding is a mechanism that explains why volume helps, not a percentage anyone should promise a fighter in week six of camp.

A secondary analysis pooling thirteen preload studies — 1,757 preload meals across 511 participants — reports that energy compensation was positively influenced by the energy and energy density of the preload and negatively by its weight, meaning heavier and more dilute preloads were compensated for less (Rolls, Roe, Cunningham, Keller and Zuraikat, Appetite 2025;213:108036). It is a pooled re-analysis of laboratory preload meals, so it reports a direction rather than an effect size anyone should carry into a camp.

At the plate this is the least controversial thing in the article. Vegetables, fruit, broth-based soups and other high-water foods let an athlete put more on the plate for the same energy. Nothing about that burns fat or accelerates anything; it changes how a fixed deficit feels to live in, which is frequently the variable that decides whether a camp holds together.

The satiety evidence, and how thin it actually is

The satiety index is the most-quoted piece of research in this area and the most over-read. Holt and colleagues fed isoenergetic 1,000 kJ (240 kcal) servings of 38 foods across six categories to groups of 11–13 subjects each, rated satiety every 15 minutes for two hours, then gave ad libitum access to a standard range of foods. Scores are the area under the satiety curve for the test food divided by the group mean for white bread, set at 100. Boiled potatoes scored highest at 323%; croissants scored lowest at 47%. Protein, fibre and water content correlated positively with the scores; fat content correlated negatively. The authors concluded that "isoenergetic servings of different foods differ greatly in their satiating capacities" (Eur J Clin Nutr 1995).

Four limits should travel with any use of it.

It is 11 to 13 people per food, one sitting, in 1995, and it has not been replicated at scale. It measures two hours of rated fullness and one subsequent meal — not daily intake, not weekly adherence, not body composition. The subjects were not athletes and were not in an energy deficit, and appetite regulation in a deficit, in someone training twice a day, is a different physiological state that has not been tested with this method. And the rankings are a reference, not a prescription: boiled potato scoring 323 does not make potato a weight-cut food. It makes water, protein and low energy density plausible criteria.

A 2005 trial is often cited alongside it. In 19 non-athlete subjects moved sequentially through a weight-maintaining diet, an isocaloric high-protein diet and then a 12-week ad libitum high-protein diet, raising protein from 15% to 30% of energy at constant carbohydrate cut spontaneous energy intake by 441 ± 63 kcal per day, with body weight falling 4.9 ± 0.5 kg and fat mass 3.7 ± 0.4 kg over the ad libitum phase (Weigle et al., Am J Clin Nutr 2005). Note the design: this is a sequence of diet phases in the same 19 people, not a randomised comparison against a control group, and nobody in it was an athlete or making weight.

The honest summary is that the satiety literature is mostly short laboratory meals in non-athletes at energy balance. It tells us which food properties track fullness. It does not tell us how much a fighter in week six of camp will eat.

Fibre is an ally for most of camp and a liability in the last days

Fibre is the clearest example of a criterion that reverses, and treating that as a contradiction is how people get it wrong. Across the 38 foods in Holt 1995, fibre content correlated positively with satiety scores. That is the direct evidence for fibre as a selection criterion in the general phase of a camp, and it is not very much evidence, but it points the same way as energy density and water content.

Close to a weigh-in the same property becomes the problem, because gut content sits on the scale. The review most people are ultimately quoting here is Acute Weight Management in Combat Sports, published as Sports Science Exchange #183 by the Gatorade Sports Science Institute and written by a GSSI staff scientist — so where it discusses sports drinks and rehydration beverages, the reader should know who is publishing it. It is also a review, not a trial: it synthesises other people's measurements, including the author's own peer-reviewed work elsewhere.

What the review says about fibre is that "certain types of dietary fiber can both slow gut transit times of foods as well as draw water into the intestinal space, 'bulking' stools", and that "the consumption of a low fiber diet for just two days begins cleansing the bowel, with seven days being as effective as a bowel preparation formula, while resulting in less physiological stress than bowel preparation formulas". It reports that indirect evidence suggests a weight loss of around 1.5% of body mass is achieved following 48 hours of fibre restriction — the review's own figure is restriction to 10 g of fibre a day or less — with no further significant losses in most individuals.

And then it says what almost nobody quotes. "Limited research examining low fiber diets in the context of AWL exists, and whole gut transit times vary widely between individuals from 10–96 h … Therefore, precise guidelines for the use of fiber restriction for AWL cannot presently be determined." That sentence is why this article does not print a day-by-day fibre plan, a gram target by day, or any sequence a reader could follow unsupervised. The review that supplies the evidence says the guidelines do not exist.

Two things are worth stating plainly because readers conflate them. Low-residue eating empties the gut; it does not reduce fat, muscle, or anything the athlete spent the camp building. And nothing is being detoxified — the mechanism is intestinal bulk and water, and the review's own phrase, "cleansing the bowel", is used in the surgical-preparation sense.

The same review also frames the whole practice with a warning rather than a permission: "Utilizing solely dehydration to achieve 5-8% BM loss is inadvisable and dangerous to health." Where it does describe magnitudes, it ties them to recovery windows — a fighter weighing in the morning of competition, with limited recovery time of around six hours or less, "should aim for no more than 5% BM acute losses", while with more than 12 hours between weigh-in and competition "a fully hydrated, well-nourished athlete may lose and recover from up to 8% BM". Those are the review's reported figures with their conditions, including the starting condition of being fully hydrated and well-nourished. They are not targets, and the final days are the part of this that belongs with a qualified sports dietitian rather than a blog.

Sodium in food: what the evidence does and does not carry

The sodium case is much thinner than the practice around it. The review states that "reductions in sodium intake may also result in body water losses, resulting from renal attempts to maintain osmotic pressure, achieved through the excretion and retention of both electrolytes and fluid" — and then gives the evidence behind it, which is one study in the wrong population.

In the review's own words: "BM losses of 1-2% have been reported in hypertensive subjects who switched to a low sodium (< 500 mg) diet for 5 days (He et al., 2001); however, no interim BM measures were taken, so it is not possible to state the exact time frame of weight loss. Furthermore, whether or not similar losses would occur in normotensive subjects is unknown." Its own verdict is that "despite the lack of definitive evidence, reductions in sodium intake during AWL are common".

That is a five-day study, in hypertensive subjects, with no interim measurements, generalised by common practice to healthy athletes. It may well be right. It has not been shown.

The food-level takeaway is therefore about awareness rather than a target. The sodium in a normal diet is concentrated in a short list of foods — broth and stock, cured and processed meat, bread, sauces and dressings, cheese, and salted snacks — and an athlete who knows where it sits knows what they are changing when they change it, in either direction.

After the weigh-in the direction reverses, and here the review is on firmer ground: "fluid retention does correlate with sodium content due to both electrolyte replacement and the effects on intestinal absorption … consuming salty snacks alongside sports drinks will increase the total sodium load ingested, thereby increasing fluid retention." It notes that sports drinks typically carry under 30 mmol/L of sodium while oral rehydration solutions carry 50–90 mmol/L — a comparison published by a sports-drink institute, which the reader is entitled to weigh. The amounts belong with a practitioner and with how to rehydrate after a weigh-in.

Foods that cause trouble, and the trials behind each

Nothing is forbidden in the general phase of a camp. Four categories have actual evidence attached to them, and three of the four are specifically about the window near competition.

High-fat and high-residue meals near competition. The review is direct: "dietary fiber and fat should be limited as consumption post weigh-in not only displaces other more important nutrients but may impair competition performance directly and indirectly. This consideration is heightened when the recovery period is limited." The mechanism given is gastric emptying — a sudden reintroduction of dietary fibre "slows gastric emptying and nutrient absorption … potentially producing GI discomfort", and the same is said of large fat intakes. The review also notes that fluids above 10% carbohydrate "may decrease the rate of gastric emptying and rehydration, as well as affect GI comfort".

This is worth saying precisely, because the slide is easy to make: glycaemic index appears in this literature as a gastric-emptying and comfort variable inside a narrow window, not as a fat-loss lever across a camp. There is no evidence here for ranking everyday camp foods by glycaemic index.

FODMAPs, for athletes who already have symptoms. Eleven competitive recreational runners — five men, six women, all with a history of non-clinical exercise-associated gastrointestinal symptoms — completed single-blinded six-day low- and high-FODMAP diets with a one-day washout and strenuous running in each. Daily gastrointestinal symptoms were significantly lower on the low-FODMAP diet; exercise-related symptoms did not differ (Lis et al., Med Sci Sports Exerc 2018). The paper's own title calls it "A Preliminary Strategy".

The conditions are heavy. Eleven people, runners rather than fighters, symptomatic athletes only, not in an energy deficit, and the improvement was in daily symptoms rather than in-exercise ones. It is a hypothesis worth knowing about if an athlete has a persistent gut problem in camp. It is not a diet to adopt on spec, and it is not free: low-FODMAP eating strips out a long list of foods that otherwise do useful work on every criterion in this article.

Alcohol. In eight physically active males performing resistance exercise plus continuous and high-intensity interval cycling, myofibrillar protein synthesis rose above rest in all conditions, but "compared to PRO, there was a hierarchical reduction in MPS with ALC-PRO (24%, P<0.05) and with ALC-CHO (37%, P<0.05)". The authors concluded that "alcohol consumption reduces rates of MPS following a bout of concurrent exercise, even when co-ingested with protein" (Parr et al., PLoS One 2014).

Eight men, one acute bout, a deliberately large dose, no energy deficit. The percentages should not be extrapolated to a camp outcome. The direction is what transfers: taking protein alongside the alcohol did not rescue the response, and the calories are doing nothing useful in a deficit.

Caffeine, if it is being used. The review summarises the dose-response relationship as U-shaped — mild to moderate doses consumed an hour before exercise producing desirable effects, and increasing doses causing "over stimulation, anxiety and potential decrements in fine motor control". That is the review's summary of the literature, reported here as such, not a dosing instruction.

A worked scenario

Take a 70 kg athlete, eight weeks out, eating four times a day. This is a scenario constructed from published figures to show how the criteria interact — not an athlete, not a case study, and not an outcome anyone observed.

The ISSN per-meal anchor of 0.25 g of high-quality protein per kg puts roughly 17.5 g of protein at the low end of a meal for this athlete, with the stand's absolute range of 20–40 g sitting above it. Four meals built around that anchor put the protein-dense item at the centre of each plate by construction, and that is the whole of the arithmetic this article will do — the daily totals, the deficit itself and the rate of loss belong to fight camp nutrition, week by week.

Now apply the second criterion. If one of those four plates is built from energy-dense items and another carries the same protein alongside a large volume of high-water vegetables, the two plates can land at very different calorie costs for the same protein delivered. Rolls 2004 measured the consequence of that difference in a lab: 7% and 12% less energy eaten at the meal after a low-energy-density first course, in 42 non-athlete women with no deficit and no training. Whether a fighter in week six behaves the same way has not been tested, which is exactly why this stays a scenario rather than a projection.

The third criterion only switches on at the end. For most of those eight weeks, the high-fibre, high-water foods filling the plate are doing useful work. In the final days they become the gut content that shows up on the scale, and the review that describes that says its own guidelines cannot presently be determined. The scenario therefore stops here, at the point where the answer stops being a food question and becomes a supervision question.

The practical reality, which nobody has studied

Flagged plainly: this section is reasoning from the evidence above, not citation. No trial has tested restaurant ordering, gym-to-job logistics or grocery budgets in combat athletes. What follows is our application of the criteria, and should be read as that.

Eating out. The criteria travel. A protein-dense centre of plate, sides that carry water and volume, and an awareness that fat and sauce are where the uncontrolled energy sits — the nearest thing to direct support is that fat content correlated negatively with satiety scores across the 38 foods in Holt 1995. That is a property, applied by us to a situation nobody has studied.

Training twice a day. The defensible bridge is two sourced points joined by our reasoning: the ISSN's statement that protein doses "should ideally be evenly distributed, every 3–4 h, across the day", and the review's gastric-comfort observations that fat and fibre slow gastric emptying and that fluids above 10% carbohydrate slow it further. Together those explain why the meal sitting between two sessions is the one that gets built differently — lower fat, lower fibre, carbohydrate-forward. No trial has tested that construction in fighters.

Cost. We are not printing a price per kilo of protein, a weekly grocery figure, or a "cheapest protein" ranking, because none was verified. What can be said fairly is an observation about one study's food list rather than an economic claim: several of the highest-scoring foods in Holt 1995 were ordinary and cheap — boiled potatoes, oatmeal, oranges, eggs.

Cooking capacity, shift work, family meals. Unsourced entirely. They are the variables that decide whether any of this survives contact with a real week, and there is no literature to point at.

The folklore, chased to where the trail dies

This is the most useful part of the page, because each of these claims is repeated constantly and each one falls apart at a specific, checkable point.

"Negative-calorie foods." There is no human evidence. The only direct test of the idea anyone has published was run on bearded dragons fed raw celery, and it came out positive: the lizards retained 23.4 ± 2.1% of the energy they ate, published in Integrative Food, Nutrition and Metabolism (2020), with a bioRxiv preprint of the same work. The human study it was responding to — Clegg and Cooper (2012), 15 female subjects, 100 g of raw celery, published only as a conference abstract — reported a digestion cost of around 86% of the meal's 67 kJ (16 kcal), but had counted the cost of digestion without accounting for the energy leaving in faeces and urine. So the popular claim rests on a human study with an acknowledged accounting gap, and its only direct empirical test was in a reptile model and found a net gain.

"No carbohydrate after 6 p.m." The trail does not merely die; it runs the other way. A six-month randomised trial assigned 78 police officers with a BMI above 30 to a calorie-restricted diet with carbohydrate eaten mostly at dinner, or to a control, and found greater reductions in weight, abdominal circumference and body fat mass — with lower daytime hunger — in the carbs-at-dinner arm (Sofer et al., Obesity 2011). The cohort is obese non-athletes, not fighters, and any hormone figures from it are hedged or left out here. The usable line is that there is no clock after which carbohydrate changes character, and at least one randomised trial found the opposite of the folklore.

"Clean eating." This one cannot be evaluated, because it has never been defined. The ISSN position stand on protein, the joint Academy/Dietitians of Canada/ACSM position, and the combat-sports review used throughout this article all specify nutrients, doses, timings and food properties. None of them defines a category of "clean" foods. The trail dies at the absence of a referent: there is nothing to test. We are not going to supply a definition for it either, because inventing one would manufacture exactly the false precision the term already has.

"Eat six small meals to boost metabolism." Dead at the meta-analysis. Pooling fifteen experimental studies, the apparent benefit of higher feeding frequency for fat mass, body fat percentage and fat-free mass was "the product of a single study, casting doubt as to whether more frequent meals confer beneficial effects on body composition", and the findings "need to be interpreted with circumspection" (Schoenfeld, Aragon and Krieger, Nutr Rev 2015). A 2023 systematic review with meta-analysis of randomised trials asked the same question again — restricted eating frequency of three meals a day or fewer against four or more, with weight change as the primary outcome — and found no meaningful advantage either way (Blazey et al., Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act 2023;20:133). No effect size from it is printed here. Spread meals for muscle protein synthesis and for training logistics if you like. The metabolic-rate claim has no support, and any version of it quoting a percentage increase is vendor arithmetic.

Any named "best fat-burning food." No primary source was found for any food burning fat, accelerating fat loss, or having a thermogenic effect large enough to matter to body composition. Green tea, cayenne, grapefruit, vinegar and celery each fail at one of three points: no trial in athletes, no trial in a deficit, or effect sizes reported in single-digit calories. No food on this page burns fat, and none will be described that way.

"Detox" and "flushing the system." Not used here at all. Where this article discusses gut content before a weigh-in, the mechanism is intestinal bulk and water, and nothing is being detoxified.

Who the evidence does not cover

Every source in this article draws overwhelmingly on adult male athletes, in small numbers, over short periods. Longland's cohort was 40 men. Mettler's was 20. Parr's was eight. Holt's satiety work used groups of 11 to 13 non-athletes at rest. Lis's FODMAP trial used 11 recreational runners, five men and six women, none of them combat athletes and none in an energy deficit. Rolls's crossover used 42 non-athlete women eating laboratory lunches at energy balance.

There is no trial of food selection in female fighters, none in adolescents, and none in competitors over 40. The differences that would matter — total body water as a fraction of body mass, cycle effects on fluid balance, growth requirements in an adolescent, age-related changes in the muscle protein response — are not adjustable with a coefficient applied to a male result. An athlete outside the cohorts above is reading evidence that was not collected about them, and the appropriate response is a qualified practitioner rather than a larger safety margin applied to the same numbers.

The weigh-in format changes the question too. A day-before weigh-in, a same-day weigh-in and an immediate-before-division IBJJF weigh-in are three different problems, and a figure borrowed from one format and applied to another has been misused. Any percentage in this literature belongs to the format it was measured under.

Fighter Cut builds the week-by-week plan from today to a weigh-in and logs food and weight against it, which makes the trend visible early; it does not know anything about an individual's physiology, and it is not a substitute for supervision in the final days.

What we could not verify

• The pooled preload analysis (13 preload studies, 1,757 preload meals, 511 participants) was checked against its published abstract. Its direction is reported above; no effect size from it is printed, because it is a methodological re-analysis of laboratory meals rather than a field finding.
• The 2023 meal-frequency meta-analysis was checked against its published abstract for design and direction only. Its null finding is stated; its effect size is not printed.
• Bergström and Hultman (1972), the origin of the 1:2.7 glycogen-to-water ratio cited inside the combat-sports review, was not fetched as a primary document. Glycogen-bound water is a contested quantity and no ratio is asserted here as fact.
• He et al. (2001), Hypertension 38:317–320, the source of the 1–2% body-mass loss on a low-sodium diet, was read only as quoted inside the review. The review's own caveats — hypertensive cohort, no interim measurements, unknown transfer to normotensive people — are reproduced above.
• Sawyer et al. (2013), cited inside the review for a roughly 2% body-mass reduction after seven days of low-carbohydrate eating with a minor energy deficit, was likewise not fetched as a primary document and is not used as a figure in this article.
• Per-food leucine content. No primary source was verified, so no per-food leucine figure appears anywhere on this page.
• The Clegg and Cooper (2012) celery study is described here as reported in the paper that criticises it; we did not read the original.
• Cost, restaurant ordering, two-a-day meal construction and household logistics. No trial exists in combat athletes. The section covering them is labelled as reasoning.

Sources

Sourced to

1. Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss — Longland TM, Oikawa SY, Mitchell CJ, Devries MC, Phillips SM, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2016;103(3):738–46. doi:10.3945/ajcn.115.119339. PMID 26817506
2. Increased protein intake reduces lean body mass loss during weight loss in athletes — Mettler S, Mitchell N, Tipton KD, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2010;42(2):326–37. PMID 19927027
3. A satiety index of common foods — Holt SH, Miller JC, Petocz P, Farmakalidis E, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1995;49(9):675–90. PMID 7498104
4. Salad and satiety: energy density and portion size of a first-course salad affect energy intake at lunch — Rolls BJ, Roe LS, Meengs JS, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2004;104(10):1570–6. PMID 15389416
5. A high-protein diet induces sustained reductions in appetite, ad libitum caloric intake, and body weight — Weigle DS, Breen PA, Matthys CC, et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2005;82(1):41–8. PMID 16002798
6. International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise — Jäger R, Kerksick CM, Campbell BI, et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2017;14:20. doi:10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8
7. Acute Weight Management in Combat Sports (Sports Science Exchange #183) — Reale R, Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Sports Science Exchange, 2018;31(183):1–6
8. Low FODMAP: A Preliminary Strategy to Reduce Gastrointestinal Distress in Athletes — Lis DM, Stellingwerff T, Kitic CM, Fell JW, Ahuja KDK, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2018;50(1):116–23. PMID 28891824
9. Alcohol ingestion impairs maximal post-exercise rates of myofibrillar protein synthesis following a single bout of concurrent training — Parr EB, Camera DM, Areta JL, et al., PLoS One, 2014;9(2):e88384. PMID 24533082
10. Effects of meal frequency on weight loss and body composition: a meta-analysis — Schoenfeld BJ, Aragon AA, Krieger JW, Nutrition Reviews, 2015;73(2):69–82. PMID 26024494
11. Greater weight loss and hormonal changes after 6 months diet with carbohydrates eaten mostly at dinner — Sofer S, Eliraz A, Kaplan S, et al., Obesity, 2011;19(10):2006–14. doi:10.1038/oby.2011.48
12. Testing the validity of negative-calorie foods with a reptile model — Buddemeyer KM, Alexander AE, Secor SM, Integrative Food, Nutrition and Metabolism, 2020
13. Negative calorie foods: an empirical examination of what is fact or fiction (preprint) — Buddemeyer KM, Alexander AE, Secor SM, bioRxiv preprint, 2019. doi:10.1101/586958
14. The effects of eating frequency on changes in body composition and cardiometabolic health in adults: a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized trials — Blazey P, Habibi A, Hassen N, Friedman D, Khan KM, Ardern CL, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2023;20:133. doi:10.1186/s12966-023-01532-z. PMID 37964316
15. High satiety: Evaluating determinants of energy compensation and intake in multiple preloading studies — Rolls BJ, Roe LS, Cunningham PM, Keller KL, Zuraikat FM, Appetite, 2025;213:108036

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