Welcome back to Weight Cut, a biweekly column about the experience, techniques and dangers of cutting weight. Today’s interview is with Amelia Moore, a 2-0 professional fighter and a longtime member of Team USA. Following bad advice and difficult experiences cutting weight early in her career, Moore sought out scientific techniques to help. She is now working on a book called “The Way Through” about what she learned.
Previous editions of Weight Cut: Timothy Bradley, Paulie Malignaggi, Andy Vences.
Amelia Moore is eating bread when we pick up the phone. She’s baked a sourdough loaf earlier in the day and is gnawing her way through the whole thing. If this scene sounds unremarkable, consider what Moore experienced to get there.
“I’ve literally fought from 147 all the way down to 125. And I’m five-eight. And naturally pretty lean and muscular genetically. It’s such an interesting journey, the whole idea of cutting weight. Because a lot of us start out, especially in the amateurs, with being told by our coaches or people around us, what weight class they think we belong in,” Moore told BoxingScene.
“So it really is like, unless you have money, unless you have resources – which, most people don’t, most of the gyms around the country and local boxing clubs are underserved communities, they don’t have big names out of their gyms – you start out in this process where it’s just trial and error. And man, is that a crazy situation.”
How crazy? Well, Moore started her boxing career fighting at 141lbs, within a hair of her walking-around weight. No problem. But, Moore recalled, “not all the Olympic weight classes were represented for women in the Olympics. We started out with three.” For her, that meant boiling down to 132lbs – with none of the healthy weight-management practices she learned later in life.
“I was dehydrating a lot, way too soon. I was putting strain on my kidneys,” Moore said. “Muscle cramping. My back hurt – why did my back hurt? Because I didn’t have enough water for my kidneys. Not eating enough, not eating the proper things.”
In the amateurs, cutting weight is even more grueling than in the professional ranks. It’s not just a one-and-done weigh-in, and it gets worse than a pesky rehydration clause.
“As an amateur, you have to hold weight for, like, 10 days,” Moore said. “That is the hard part, and that’s why it’s so important to kind of live at your weight class as much as possible. You’re making weight repeatedly, day after day. World championships can be 10 days long.”
Trying to force herself down to 125lbs through starvation and dehydration took Moore to her low point.
“I had more injuries at 125 than I ever had in my entire career,” Moore lamented. “I had a posterior tib [tibial] issue, which led into a hamstring issue. I think I had an Achilles tear before I had the posterior tib pain. And eventually, I tore my hamstring. In competition. And I still had to fight two more fights with it torn. Where does that stem from? Overtraining. Dehydration. Underfueling. Eventually your body pays the price.”
It wasn’t just pain during competition. Moore suffered from amenorrhea, going an astonishing nine months without getting her period.
“If you don’t cycle, if a female doesn’t cycle, it starts to mess with your bone density,” Moore said. “Amenorrhea can cause osteoporosis, almost. And it causes stress fractures.”
She didn’t get much help from Team USA.
“Even being on Team USA for as long as I was, nobody talked about these things with me,” Moore said. “And they have the resources. So why aren’t they utilizing them for these weight cut athletes?
“If I don’t win, you guys drop me. And you don’t give a shit about what happens to me when I have hormonal rebound and I’m not getting my period for friggin’ nine months. And my brain is going insane, because I’m not producing progesterone. And my cortisol’s too high, and I’m making no GABA [gamma-aminobutyric acid] in my brain, and I’m going fucking psycho. All these things, you guys don’t have to worry about, because you’re only paying me $700 a month. But my boyfriend hates me right now. I can’t think because I’m in this state.”
A visit to a male gynecologist to help her amenorrhea proved fruitless as well. Rather than examine her training and caloric load, the OB/GYN prescribed birth control pills.
“It was, ‘Here’s a packet of birth control pills that we know causes cancer when you take them orally, but that’s the answer. Here’s your band-aid. Please walk out my door.’” Moore said.
“I’m sure there’s great male OB/GYNs, but I’m yet to find one,” she quipped.
Moore decided that somebody could have all the qualifications in the world, as many letters following their name as possible, and she still wouldn’t trust their opinion on cutting weight if they hadn’t done it themselves.
“If you have not competed and actively done something in this sport, I don’t care how many books you’ve read. I don’t care how many case studies you’ve read. I don’t care if you’ve witnessed weight cuts. If you have not done this, you do not understand what the athletes are going through.” (She’s not alone in that opinion.)
The physical and mental hell inspired Moore to seek out weight-cutting wisdom herself.
“I just started digging into the science of it. Let’s make this make sense, so I can perform my best. I’m sacrificing everything, and I want to get the results naturally, you know what I mean?”
The more she immersed herself into facts and evidence, the more she saw the obsolescence of traditional weight-cutting methods.
“These combat sports which are weight-class-driven sports seem to just run on traditional, archaic, unfounded practices.”
Note that Moore said combat sports there, not just boxing. She cites the MMA fighter Cris Cyborg’s attempt to squeeze down to 135lbs for a fight with Ronda Rousey. “She was just too big,” Moore said. But Cyborg tried anyway, and her suffering was put on blast to the public in an infamous video of her sobbing while shedding pounds.
“The videos of her crying, getting out of these baths, on the floor with a team of four people around her – that was normal,” Moore said. “That was normal to have people to be like, ‘This is just how it goes. This is the level of suffering that it takes.’”
Moore’s weight-making routine now couldn’t be more different.
“Something that I’ve come to understand now, and I think this is really key – you don’t die from lack of calories. You die of lack of nutrients… I eat liver when I’m weight-cutting. Especially when I’m getting to the point where I know I’m in a deficit. Because it’s one of the most nutrient-dense foods you could possibly eat, with all of your minerals and vitamins that your body needs to be able to keep from having a breakdown.”
Moore also monitors her vitals to learn what her body needs.
“I got a WHOOP, a biometric tracker, in 2020. It was an absolute game-changer. It’s really, really important to have an idea of what your caloric output is, especially during training camp.”
Moore says the WHOOP is more conservative in its calorie tracking than Garmin or other popular brands, allowing her to build extra margin into what she can eat.
She is so familiar with the contours and dangers of cutting weight that she prefers to modify the term itself.
“Getting individualized protocols and understanding the real science behind what I’m doing and why I’m doing it has been the key factor to changing the experience of weight cutting – and kind of throwing out the word ‘weight cut’ to ‘weight management.’”
To ensure she doesn’t have to endure dramatic cuts anymore, Moore tries to remain within 7 percent of her fighting weight.
And she wants to help other fighters, too. She is writing a book called The Way Through, “on performance optimization, specifically around weight cutting for combat athletes.” She is working with sports scientists on the book, but one also hopes it contains her personal journey with cutting weight.
The arc of her sitting in a gynecologist’s office, not having her illnesses taken seriously, to this – secure in knowledge, reliant on facts rather than bad advice, dispensing her accumulated wisdom to others – is as inspiring a journey as any that have taken place inside the ring.
Owen Lewis is a freelance writer with bylines at Defector Media and The Guardian. He is also a writer and editor at BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, books, travel and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky and can be contacted at owentennis11@gmail.com.
