Bernardo Faria on Intermittent Fasting and BJJ Weight Gain
Bernardo Faria retired from competitive Jiu-Jitsu in 2017, and he's been fighting the same battle every BJJ competitor eventually fights ever since: what happens to your body when the training…
Bernardo Faria retired from competitive Jiu-Jitsu in 2017, and he's been fighting the same battle every BJJ competitor eventually fights ever since: what happens to your body when the training volume that used to justify your appetite quietly disappears. This week the multiple-time Pan American and World No-Gi champion opened up about the tool he's leaned on for almost a decade to keep it under control — intermittent fasting — and the story behind it is more useful than the headline suggests.
The math that catches every retired competitor off guard
Watch the original post on X, where Faria laid out the problem in plain terms: he built his eating habits around training two or three times a day, every day, for years. Then competition ended, and training dropped to two or three sessions a week. His appetite didn't get the memo. The pounds arrived fast, and they arrived for a reason that has nothing to do with willpower — it's simple energy math, and it catches nearly everyone who's ever trained BJJ at a serious volume.
This is the part of the athlete's journey nobody puts on a highlight reel. Competitive Jiu Jitsu asks the body to burn an enormous number of calories just to survive the schedule, and it builds an appetite to match. When the schedule shrinks — a new job, a family, an injury, or simply retirement — the appetite is often the last thing to catch up. Faria's experience is a well-known one across grappling gyms everywhere: the "off-season 15" that never quite goes away because there's no real off-season anymore, just life.
What he actually does — and doesn't
According to Faria, the fix that stuck was intermittent fasting, which he's now practiced for close to nine years. What's notable is how loosely he holds it. He isn't running a rigid protocol with a stopwatch and a spreadsheet. In his own words, reported by BJJEE: "I don't follow super strict rules. I just try to go as many hours as I comfortably can without eating." That's a meaningfully different pitch than the internet's usual fasting advice, which tends to arrive wrapped in strict windows and hard rules. Faria's version is closer to a flexible habit than a diet plan, which may be exactly why it's lasted nine years instead of nine weeks.
He also pointed to a side benefit that has less to do with the scale and more to do with his current work. Faria now spends much of his day building BJJ Fanatics and running his instructional business from a computer, and he says skipping the mid-day meal keeps him sharper through the afternoon rather than dragging through the post-lunch slump. It's a small detail, but it fits a pattern plenty of Jiu Jitsu practitioners with desk jobs will recognize — the difference between grinding through the 3 p.m. wall and just not hitting it in the first place.
To his credit, Faria didn't present any of this as gospel. He was explicit that he's "not a doctor or scientist" and isn't claiming intermittent fasting is right for everyone. He framed it as what worked for one specific transition — a professional Jiu-Jitsu athlete's body adjusting to hobbyist volume, and later, an older body needing an easier way to hold weight steady while still enjoying food.
Why this matters beyond one athlete's diet
The BJJ community loses very few people to injury or boredom compared to how many it loses to exactly this transition — the slow drift from "training partner who needs the calories" to "hobbyist whose habits never adjusted." It happens to blue belts who used to train five days a week in college and now train twice. It happens to competitors who retire from the circuit the way Faria did. It happens to anyone whose Jiu Jitsu volume changes but whose kitchen doesn't notice.
What makes Faria's account worth reading isn't the specific tool — plenty of people manage the same problem with portion control, tracking, or just eating more vegetables. It's the honesty about the cause. Weight gain after cutting training volume isn't a mystery or a moral failure; it's an equation that used to balance and now doesn't. Fixing it starts with noticing the imbalance, the way Faria clearly did, rather than blaming the mats for a problem the mats aren't causing anymore.
If you've ever gone from training BJJ four times a week to twice, or paused Jiu Jitsu for a stretch and watched the scale move without understanding why, Faria's story isn't really about fasting. It's a reminder that the sport changes your relationship with food in ways that don't automatically reverse when the training does. Whatever tool closes that gap for you — fasting, tracking, or just paying attention — the first step is the same one Faria took: noticing the math changed before your habits did.
See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.