Eat Like a Fighter: Why Seasonality Is the Most Overlooked Weapon in Wrestling Nutrition - with Kyle Dake
This conversation started with something simple—my love for oysters and their benefits—but it quickly turns into something deeper. Diet, especially for athletes, requires a higher level of thinking than just picking foods off a list.
If you’ve been around wrestling long enough, you’ve heard every version of the “perfect diet”—keto, carnivore, high-carb, low-carb, intermittent fasting. Everyone is searching for the answer, but the truth is none of those are the answer. They’re tools, and if you don’t understand when to use a tool, it becomes a liability. What most athletes miss, and what changed everything for me, is this: your body doesn’t just respond to nutrients—it responds to signals from the environment. That’s where seasonality comes in.
Before nutrition became an industry, it was about survival. Your body evolved to eat what’s available, when it’s available, in alignment with light, temperature, and stress. Summer meant lighter foods, more hydration, and more movement. Fall was for building—denser foods, more calories, preparing for stress. Winter emphasized recovery, resilience, and simplification. Now we’ve broken that system. You can eat strawberries in the winter, consume processed food year-round, and override your environment completely. Your body will adapt—for a while—until it doesn’t.
Most athletes focus on macros and calories, which is the biochemical side of nutrition, but there’s another layer that often gets ignored: biophysics. Food grown in its natural environment carries a different signal than food forced to grow outside of it. Sunlight, soil quality, growth speed, and environmental stress all matter. That’s why in-season food tastes better—it’s not just flavor; your body recognizes it differently. You’re not just feeding muscle; you’re feeding your entire system, especially your gut. And your gut drives everything—recovery, energy, inflammation, even mental clarity. If your gut is off, your performance is off. It’s that simple.
For me, this became practical. If you live in a northern climate, your diet should reflect that. That means building a foundation around fish, wild game, and pasture-raised animals year-round—stable, nutrient-dense foods your body can rely on. In the winter, you lean into foods that store well, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and root vegetables—foods that were historically available because they lasted. Then, as late spring, summer, and fall come around, you shift. You eat what grows in your environment: fresh vegetables, seasonal fruits, and foods exposed to the same sunlight and conditions you are. That alignment matters more than people think. It’s not about restriction—it’s about timing.
There are also a few things I consistently avoid. I stay away from most grains—almost no pasta and very little bread—because, for me, they don’t add much in terms of performance and can create more issues than benefits. I also avoid most seed oils, which is a big one. Instead, I stick with butter, olive oil, avocado oil, and animal fats—fats that have been around forever and that your body knows how to use. A lot of modern nutrition problems come from introducing foods the body wasn’t designed to process at scale. You don’t need to overcomplicate it; if something didn’t exist in your environment 100 years ago, it’s worth questioning.
One of the biggest mistakes athletes make is turning diets into identities. Saying “I’m keto,” “I’m carnivore,” or labeling yourself in any rigid way locks you into something that doesn’t serve performance. You’re not any of those things—you’re an athlete, and athletes adapt. What you eat should depend on your training phase, your environment, and your goal. If you’re in a heavy training block, your needs are different than during recovery. If you’re cutting weight, your strategy changes again. If you’re competing, everything tightens up. There is no one way—only the right way for the moment.
Over time, my thinking around food has evolved. I’ve become less dogmatic and more focused on using food as a tool, while still enjoying it. Because if everything becomes rigid, you miss the bigger picture. Yes, food should support performance and optimize recovery, but it also needs to be sustainable. The goal isn’t perfection—the goal is alignment.
At the highest level, everyone is training hard, drilling, and putting in the work. The real edge comes from the details, and nutrition—done right—is one of the biggest details you can control. Not by eating more or chasing trends, but by eating in alignment with your environment, your training, and your body. That’s the difference. That’s the edge. And most people are completely missing it.
