For a good chunk of my life, I have wrestled. It is a beautiful sport in a vacuum, but there is an ugly side when it comes to weight classes. In wrestling, there is a very common practice known as cutting, which is basically losing weight within a certain amount of time. Oftentimes, this is a short term cut within a few days in which one has to think about the physical weight of the foods and drinks as well as things like water retention and fiber. I had played other sports when I was younger, but when I got to high school I didn’t quite understand just how much wrestling would be omnipresent in my bodily life, specifically surrounding food. With something like tennis, my diet would simply be whatever my mom made, or what we ordered when we went out. Once I had to start watching my weight to make sure I was in the right weight class for the team, my diet started to shift. Especially when we would be close to matches, and I would stress the whole (fully dehydrated) 24 hours before weigh ins. Immediately after weigh ins, I would go rehydrate and fuel up with foods like Cheerios and honey to give me quick energy. Even with all of these things in mind, we still had to go out and wrestle right after this starvation. We were expected to perform at our best after depriving ourselves of nutrients to make an arbitrary weight. I think it is interesting that this extremely physical sport inadvertently turns the body into something that is purely focused on one thing.
I agree with you, and how it’s intresting that sports like wrestling show how we as humans, have socialized ourselves into reshaping the body into a single commitment. The whole concept of wrestling is already heavily reliant on bodily positioning, as well as gauging and overpowering the other opponent, so it makes sense of why this becomes highly valued, because humans highly value strength. I’m sorry that you had to go through these sort of cuts and how it shaped your eating habits. Especially because of the pressure for needing to achieve a certain weight in such short brackets of time. It’s a strange paradox of deprivation, because of that pressure that you’re supposed to be at “optimal” performance and weight while essentially depriving yourself of core supplements to get through the day. As well as the added societal pressure plus stress that comes in with weigh-ins, and that due to a person not being the “optimal” weight, then they can potentially not compete at all, even after all the conditioning which seems crushing.
When i read your post I though back to high school where I had a couple friends that also did wrestling, as a track runner I never understood how they were able to the the intense workouts they had to do in their hot enclosed training room while barely eating all day. I remember my heavyweight friends who just came from doing football in the spring having to go through conditioning, and genuinely felling bad for them. I understand that weight classes are important in fighting sports but at least for high schoolers there needs to be a better understandings for the risks of depriving yourself of food to keep a specific weight.