Weight-loss strategies for the severely fit

HEIDI GAISER/ Daily Inter Lake

As a wrestling mom, I have a genuine handicap. People who know me well will attest that eating is really very important to me.

So I got in trouble with my son the other night for asking him if he had eaten lunch after he at first refused much of the meager and healthy dinner I brought him after high school wrestling practice.

I'm certainly not trying to sabotage his need to make weight; I just can't fathom working as hard as they do and then not eating anything less than an enormous meal afterward.

And then I hear stories of the old ways and I realize that cutting back on eating is a small sacrifice.

My husband wrestled until he got to high school. Despite the fact that he was growing in height, he wanted to remain in the same weight class throughout junior high because he didn't want to face certain wrestlers in higher weights.

So during a summer wrestling program in Colorado, where summers can be plenty hot, he would go to practice in the morning, come home, put on a sweat suit made of some unnatural substance, and head for his lawn-mowing jobs. He would throw in a few calisthenics every time he dumped a bag of clippings, and then head back and mow some more.

A co-worker said his high school wrestling season followed his cross-country season. So when he entered wrestling, he was very fit, there was no visible fat on his body and he was still 10 pounds too heavy.

So he also would wear the infamous rubber sweat suit, head down to the basement of his home, turn up the heat and run back and forth, until his father yelled at him for increasing the family utility bill.

He occasionally lost control of his willpower and would indulge in a Little Debbie Swiss Roll, rebelling against the program's approved diet of oranges and cottage cheese.

More basement laps in the rubber suit followed.

Perhaps the most drastic thing he ever did, he said, was when a teammate cut his hair with tape scissors on the football field at a Colorado high school so he could make weight for a summer freestyle tournament. It worked, though.

Wrestlers have used other harmless strategies to make weight; another co-worker said a common practice was to suck on hard candy that would build up saliva, and then spit to drop the necessary ounces.

He said when he really needed to cut weight - 17 pounds his senior year - he'd wear plastic bags, lots of clothes and his letterman's jacket and run stairs in the gym from 6 a.m. until school started.

He'd have a popsicle and an orange for lunch; he said he and other wrestlers also thought raisins were acceptable, since they would swell up in the stomach so you would feel full. He said it was amazing what a person could get used to.

Things have changed. The latter co-worker, who recently was a sportswriter, has found that coaches are more savvy to the health detriments of extreme weight-cutting measures.

The coaches of my son's team emphasized in a parent meeting and in the official team handbook that the wrestlers in their program are expected to drop weight if they need to in approved and healthy ways. That's much appreciated by a food-pushing parent such as myself.

And my son hasn't done anything strange to cut his weight at this point, so I think he's taken his coaches' plans for weight loss to heart.

And he's not getting a rubber sweat suit for Christmas.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com