Welcome back to Weight Cut, a biweekly Sunday column about the experience, techniques and dangers of cutting weight. Today’s interview is with Paulie Malignaggi, a former fighter who fought at 135, 140 and 147lbs and won an IBF world title at 140. He fought many of the best of his time, including Miguel Cotto, Ricky Hatton, Zab Judah and Shawn Porter. He is now a commentator on ProBox TV (meaning, in full disclosure, he and I both work for Garry Jonas). The first edition of Weight Cut can be found here.

Paulie Malignaggi had a routine for losing weight the morning of a weigh-in. He would always be a couple pounds heavier than where he needed to be – occasionally as many as four or five pounds, but usually two or three. So he would lather himself in Albolene, a lotion that opened his pores and let him sweat more. He would put on layers, go into his hotel bathroom, turn on the hot water in the sink and bathtub, and seal the crack in the door with a towel to make the room as hot as possible. Then he would shadowbox lightly, for as long as a half-hour, while listening to music.

“If the bathroom was smaller, it was even better, because it got hotter faster,” Malignaggi told BoxingScene.

Like clockwork, the pounds came off.

Well, not as easily as clockwork. Once, the night before a fight with Juan Diaz at a brutal 138½lbs catchweight, Malignaggi was behind pace with his weight cut and dehydrated himself to the point that he couldn’t sleep.

“I did not sleep all night,” Malignaggi said. “I was losing my mind. I remember getting up in the middle of the night, doing that workout, just so I could have a drink. And then knowing that, yeah, I get a drink, but I would basically put the weight right back. But I was so miserable. Your mind starts messing with you.”

Malignaggi rewarded himself with a sip of Gatorade, which he hoped would help him sleep. “I could live off the aftertaste of that Gatorade – the aftertaste stays in your mouth – and hope that I could sleep an hour off of that aftertaste. But the Gatorade also put the weight right back on. So I would have to do the same workout in the morning, regardless. You’re actually losing your mind.”

Asked what it felt like to shed those last pounds, Malignaggi said the sensations were closer to “torture” than pain.

Despite that last-minute masochism, Malignaggi actually began cutting weight early in his camps.

“I would start camp, and I would eat normal, healthy meals,” Malignaggi told BoxingScene. “I would cut out the junk. Then my body would drop a little bit. At a certain point, your body’s not dropping anymore because even if you’re eating healthy, your body has reached that limit. So you’ve gotta now make the meals a little smaller.

“Later in camp, I would get to the point where I would have one meal a day, and the rest of the day would be little snacks – protein bars and hard boiled eggs every couple of hours, just to trick the metabolism into continuing to move.”

Malignaggi timed those meals for after his main workout of the day so that he could feel somewhat refreshed afterwards. But those, too, were a temporary comfort.

“You end up having to cut out that last meal, and then it just becomes all little snacks,” Malignaggi said. “They’re not junk snacks, they’re healthy snacks. … Eventually, you reach your wits’ end with that, too, but you’re still not at weight. Then you gotta go through water weight.”

Malignaggi saved water weight for the end to dehydrate as little as possible. Though some drop water weight earlier, Malignaggi thinks extended periods of hydration “aren’t good for endurance athletes.” Instead, he had a “two-and-a-half week, slow, step-by-step process of dehydration.”

This process involved “going into workouts already thirsty, and you know you’re gonna come out of it even more thirsty. People think, ‘Oh, they’re thirsty, go and get a drink of water.’ No, at the dry-out point, you’re beginning your workouts thirsty, and then you’re gonna be even more thirsty when you’re done, and you only get a little bit of liquid back. It’s really, really horrible.”

It’s food for thought next time fans accuse a boxer of making excuses when they mention a bad weight cut following a disappointing performance. And speaking of food – Malignaggi couldn’t even gorge himself once he hopped off the scale. His body craved liquid so much that he had to drink first. Sometimes, he would try to eat a huge meal, only to find that his stomach had turned in for the night.

“You need to hydrate first,” Malignaggi said. “You won’t even enjoy the meal. I was so thirsty by the time I got on the scale, I wasn’t even thinking about food. As soon as I hydrated, though, my stomach reminded me I was hungry.”

If, understandably, you think this sounds so awful that boxers need to fight closer to their natural weights, consider the alternative from the boxer’s perspective.

“People will tell you [cutting weight is] not healthy. … It's also not healthy to go in with guys who are too big for you in the ring and then get your brain beaten by guys who show up 20 pounds heavier than you the next night,” Malignaggi said. “Pick your poison.

“I feel like, because there’s space between the weigh-in and the fight, you have to do it that way. If you fight at your walk-around weight, you’re gonna fight guys that are too big.”

Malignaggi thinks fighters would still subject themselves to sickening weight cuts even if boxing re-implemented same-day weigh-ins. If he’s right, fighters could then enter the ring dangerously malnourished and with their brains more susceptible to trauma. The current system, though deeply flawed, is there for a reason.

As his career wore on, Malignaggi, like many fighters, grew heavier naturally. He walked around in the 150s early in his professional boxing run, when he fought at 135 and 140. At the tail end of his career, while beginning a training camp for a welterweight scrap, he weighed 182.

“When I moved to 147, I didn’t want to go there, you know?” he said. “But I knew the struggles that I had making weight for the Amir Khan [fight]. I remember telling my team, ‘Even if I win this title, there’s no way I’m gonna hold this weight. I’m not gonna fight in this weight class anymore.’ I knew I was done.”

Malignaggi skews towards skepticism when it comes to steep climbs up weight classes. “Today, when I see all these guys jumping weight classes like it’s nothing – it’s very, very difficult to do that. You gotta be on some really nice performance-enhancers. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like. It must feel really nice to be able to cut that corner.”

 

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For all the pain of cutting weight, Malignaggi trusted his body to shed the pounds. “I will repeat, your body is designed to take punishment at that point,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody tells me. If you had a good camp, and trained hard in camp, you can take that. I don’t care what doctor tells me anything, I lived it myself. … You don’t get into a ring with a guy 20lbs bigger than you, because that’s more dangerous.”

Still, in the end, punishing his body in so many camps took its toll. “I did find, later in my career, I couldn’t recover from a bad weight cut the way I could recover when I was in my early, mid-20s. … When you’re older, that hard, hard, weight cut sometimes stays with you on fight night. Less snap in your shots, you’re not as explosive with your legs closing the gap or leaving the pocket.”

And though Malignaggi’s mental strength assured he would make weight all those times, he wore down over time.

“I love to box, I love to train, I used to love all that. But making weight really turned it into something I didn’t want to do,” Malignaggi said. Between that and age leading to more injuries during camp, he took his leave from the sport.

“I just hated that struggle with the scale. I really, really hated it.”

Owen Lewis is a former intern at Defector Media and writes and edits for 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.