How to eat while cutting for a race or meet

Updated 25 October 2026 · General information, not medical advice

A race or a lifting meet gives a cut a deadline, which is useful. It also tempts people into the two classic mistakes: starting too late and going too hard, or still dieting through the taper and arriving at the start line tired and flat. The fix is to plan backwards from the date, finish the fat loss early, and treat the last few weeks as performance weeks.

This is general information for healthy adults. It is not medical or nutrition advice, and it does not cover rapid weight cutting for weigh-ins, such as dehydration or very low intakes in the final days. Those methods carry real risks and, if your sport needs them at all, should be planned with a qualified coach or sports dietitian and within your sport’s rules. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, are under 18, or have a history of disordered eating, please get individual advice.

The short answer

Count back from the event and finish the deficit two to four weeks before it.
Lose slowly: around 0.5 to 1 percent of body weight a week, at the lower end if training is heavy.
Keep hard sessions fuelled throughout the cut.
Eat at maintenance during the taper. A taper is not a diet.
In race week, eat for the event, not for the scale.

Work back from the date

Start with how much you realistically want to lose and divide by a safe weekly rate. Helms 2014 suggests 0.5 to 1 percent of body weight per week for lean athletes, and Garthe 2011 found that elite athletes losing about 0.7 percent a week kept more lean mass and gained more strength than those losing about twice as fast. For an 80 kg athlete, half a percent is about 0.4 kg a week, so losing 3 kg takes roughly eight weeks of consistent work, before any buffer.

Here is one way to lay that out with 16 weeks to go:

Weeks out	Focus
16 to 15	Set the start weight from a 1 to 2 week trend; settle the budget
14 to 5	Cut at about 0.5% of body weight a week (about 0.4 kg); hard days fuelled
4 to 3	Buffer: back to maintenance, or keep going only if well short of the goal
2 to 1	Taper: maintenance, eat for the sessions, no new foods
Race week	Event fuelling; carbohydrate up before long events

If the numbers do not fit, change the goal rather than the rate. Arriving a kilo heavier and well trained is almost always better than arriving lighter and under-recovered.

During the cut: protect the key sessions

The weeks of the cut are usually also your hardest training block. Keep protein steady every day and move carbohydrate with the training: more on interval, long and heavy days, less on easy and rest days. The guides on rest day vs training day eating and carb targets for hard and easy days cover the numbers. If quality sessions start falling apart for more than a week or two, add food back on the hard days before anything else.

The taper is not a diet

A taper cuts training volume so you arrive fresh. In the meta-analysis by Bosquet and colleagues (2007), the tapers that worked best lasted about two weeks and reduced volume by roughly 40 to 60 percent while keeping intensity and frequency. Less volume does mean slightly lower energy needs, and some people use that as a chance to squeeze in more weight loss. That defeats the point of tapering: the aim is to recover and refill, not to create a new deficit. Eat around maintenance, keep the carbohydrate on the sessions that remain, and expect the scale to rise a little as glycogen and the water stored with it come back. That is fuel, not fat.

Race week

Endurance events over about 90 minutes: the 2016 joint statement and Burke 2011 describe carbohydrate loading at about 10 to 12 grams per kilogram per day for the 36 to 48 hours before. Practise it before a less important event first.
Shorter events: normal eating with a carbohydrate-rich meal the day before and a familiar breakfast is usually enough.
Lifting meets: if you are already inside your weight class, eat normally and keep it boring. If you are not, the time to fix that was weeks ago; see the note above about rapid weight cuts.
Everyone: no new foods, no new supplements, and fuel during the event the way you practised in training.

After the event

Come back up to maintenance and take a few weeks before starting another cut. Long, unbroken stretches of dieting, especially alongside heavy training, are where the risks described in the 2023 IOC statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport start to build up. If you lifted or raced well, that is the point.

Where PlatePace fits

PlatePace gives you a cut, recomp or maintain goal and adjusts each day’s targets to the session type, so you can switch from cut to maintain for the buffer and taper weeks without redoing your plan. The weekly review shows a smoothed weight trend against your goal rate, which is the number to watch when you are working towards a date. Travel days can be flagged so they stay out of the averages. If you are an endurance athlete, also read calorie tracking for endurance athletes; if you lift and the date is far away, a recomp may suit you better than a cut.

Sources

Helms ER, Aragon AA, Fitschen PJ. Evidence-based recommendations for natural bodybuilding contest preparation: nutrition and supplementation. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2014;11:20.
Garthe I, et al. Effect of two different weight-loss rates on body composition and strength and power-related performance in elite athletes. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2011;21(2):97-104.
Bosquet L, Montpetit J, Arvisais D, Mujika I. Effects of tapering on performance: a meta-analysis. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2007;39(8):1358-1365.
Burke LM, Hawley JA, Wong SHS, Jeukendrup AE. Carbohydrates for training and competition. J Sports Sci. 2011;29(S1):S17-S27.
Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. American College of Sports Medicine, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and Dietitians of Canada joint position statement: nutrition and athletic performance. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2016;48(3):543-568.
Mountjoy M, et al. 2023 International Olympic Committee's (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs). Br J Sports Med. 2023;57(17):1073-1097.