Merab Dvalishvili Had 5 Kilos Left for UFC 333. Fight Week Empties the Gut, Too.

The video runs 108 seconds. Merab Dvalishvili sits shirtless in a wicker chair on a sunlit balcony, in green fight shorts, the map of Georgia tattooed over his heart, and tells his phone he has cut seven kilos and has five to go. He posted it on Wednesday morning, about 45 hours before the official weigh-in for his third fight with Petr Yan. We read the post, the fight-week schedule and the three sports-nutrition papers that describe what a cut like this asks of the body, to answer a narrower question than whether he makes weight: how much of a fighter’s final weigh-in number is simply what is sitting in the gut.

The short version is that water and sweat do most of the work, and food does a measurable slice of it. Below: what he said, what the scale has to read on Friday, what a low-fibre fight week takes off and puts back, and the everyday version anyone can see on a bathroom scale after a few days of white bread.

The post: Five kilos left, two days out, in his own words

Dvalishvili’s post on X, published at 06:58 UTC on October 21, 2026, reads “5 kg Left”, followed by a line in Georgian that translates as five kilos left to lose and two days before the weigh-ins. In the clip, as transcribed by MiddleEasy, he says: “I cut already seven kilos and five kilos left.”

The rest of the plan, as transcribed by MMA Sucka, is a list fighters will recognise: “I still drink water, a little bit,” then “From today, no more water, just maybe sip water and a little bit food,” and “lots of sweat.” He also points at his own frame: “As you see, I’m already skinny.”

The target is fixed. UFC.com lists Yan against Dvalishvili as a bantamweight title bout on Saturday, October 24, at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, and the bantamweight limit is 135 pounds, or 61.2 kg. The National lists the closed official weigh-ins for 8 a.m. on Friday, with the ceremonial weigh-ins that evening. The series is 1-1: Dvalishvili won the first fight, and Yan won the title from him in December 2025.

By our arithmetic, five kilos above 61.2 kg puts him at about 66.2 kg when he posted, and seven plus five is 12 kg in all, close to a fifth of the division limit. Five kilos is about 7.6 percent of 66.2 kg. For scale, the 2025 International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) position stand on combat-sport weight cuts describes 5.7 percent of body mass as a suitable loss at 48 hours before a weigh-in. Fighters differ, and the paper is a guide, not a ruling on any one athlete.

The gut: What a low-fibre fight week takes off the scale

A cut has layers. The ISSN stand lists them in the order fighters use them: a slow drop in calories across the camp, then in fight week a drop in carbohydrate, which releases the water stored with glycogen in muscle, then sodium tricks and water loading, then sweat in the final 24 hours. One layer is the gut. The stand says a low-fibre intake of under 10 grams a day for four days produces losses “equivalent” to the 1 to 2 percent of body mass from glycogen depletion.

The mechanism is plain. Fibre is the part of plant food the small intestine cannot digest. It travels on to the colon, holds water, feeds bacteria, and adds bulk to stool. Take most of it away and there is simply less material, and less water bound to it, in the bowel at any one time. Nothing about that is fat loss; it is a lighter load in transit.

The cleanest measurement comes from a 2022 study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Nineteen healthy men ate their usual diet, about 30 grams of fibre a day, for a week, then four days under 10 grams, with calories, macronutrients and exercise matched. On the morning of day five they weighed 0.58 kg less, 0.74 percent of body mass. Bowel movements fell from two a day to one, stools got harder, hunger rose a little, and 18 of the 19 said the diet was tolerable.

Applied to a 66.2 kg fighter, our arithmetic gives about 0.5 kg using the 2022 study’s average, and 0.7 to 1.3 kg using the ISSN range: somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of a 5 kg gap. That is a general figure for the method, not a reading of what Dvalishvili ate. He said only “a little bit food”, and we do not know his menu.

What professionals actually eat that week has now been written down. A 2026 study in Nutrients, with authors from the UFC Performance Institute, collected food records from professional MMA fighters for the 24 hours before weigh-in, after it, and on fight day. Before the scale: severe carbohydrate and fibre restriction, with vegetables, dairy, legumes, whole grains and fried foods systematically dropped. After the scale: high-fibre and high-fat foods stayed off the plate through recovery.

After the scale: Why fibre stays off the plate on Friday night

The weigh-in comes about a day and a half before the walkout, and the refeed is a gut problem of its own. The ISSN stand advises oral rehydration solution at 1 to 1.5 litres an hour straight after the weigh-in, fast-acting carbohydrate at up to 60 grams an hour after that, and a goal of regaining at least 10 percent of body mass. It also says, in one line, that fibre intake after the weigh-in “should be limited to avoid gastrointestinal distress.”

The reasoning is about volume and speed. A gut that has spent days on little food and little water is asked to take in litres of fluid and hundreds of grams of carbohydrate in an evening. Fibre slows emptying and ferments in the colon into gas, which no one wants on fight night. That is why the stand names fast-acting carbohydrate for the refeed: it digests quickly and leaves little behind.

The ISSN stand closes with a caveat worth keeping: the long-term effects of repeated weight cuts on health and performance are not known.

The everyday version: The same few kilos most people have seen on a bathroom scale

Nobody outside a fight camp needs to cut weight this way, but the gut’s share is easy to recognise. A few days of white bread, pasta and little produce can take half a kilo off the morning scale, and a weekend of salads, beans and whole grains can put it back. That swing is the 2022 study in miniature: food and water in transit, not fat gained or lost. Fibre is the part of that swing that does the gut good, from regular bowel movements to food for the bacteria in the colon, which is why the papers above treat a low-fibre week as a short tool for the scale, not a diet.

On Friday morning Dvalishvili either reads 135 or he does not, and on Saturday the trilogy settles a 1-1 series. Whatever the scale says, a slice of it will have been the gut.

How we checked this: Sources and method

We read Merab Dvalishvili’s own post on X (October 21, 2026, 06:58 UTC) and its text; his spoken lines are quoted as transcribed by MiddleEasy and MMA Sucka on October 21, 2026, and we say so each time. The fight details come from the UFC.com event page and The National’s October 17, 2026 fight-week guide. The science comes from three papers read on PubMed and matched to their titles: Foo and colleagues, 2022 (PMID 35313275); the ISSN position stand by Ricci and colleagues, 2025 (PMID 40059405); and Evans and colleagues, 2026 (PMID 42739050). Every calculation marked as ours uses 135 lb = 61.2 kg and his posted 5 kg remaining. We do not know what Dvalishvili ate and we make no claim about his health. This article is educational, describes what the cited sources say, and is not medical advice.