Former Pro-Wrestler Gabbi Tuft Shares How She Shed 100 Pounds of Muscle Since Transitioning

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11 months ago

Gabbi Tuft isn’t done impressing her fans. Way back when (think: 2008 to 2012), former pro-wrestler Tuft spent her days proving her mettle in the ring, wrestling under the renowned moniker “Tyler Recks.” Those in the know might remember the archetypal WWE professional wrestler physique that Recks was known for — but that’s not the physique Tuft is cultivating now.

After coming out publicly as trans two years ago and beginning her own journey behind the scenes before then, Tuft has been working to slim down from her former 280-pound physique. It’s been no easy task. Completing a body recomposition from the 280-pound physique that she sported as Tyler Reks into her current 160-pound form would be no small feat for anyone.

Over the past three years, Tuft has made more than 100 pounds of remarkable progress toward her once daunting weight loss goal. BarBend circled up with the wrestling phenom to find out how she dramatically shed more than 100 pounds of muscle in the pursuit of her ideal post-coming-out figure.

Editor’s Note: The content on BarBend is meant to be informative in nature, but it should not be taken as medical advice. When starting a new training regimen and/or diet, it is always a good idea to consult with a trusted medical professional. We are not a medical resource. The opinions and articles on this site are not intended for use as diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of health problems. They are not substitutes for consulting a qualified medical professional.

The Slim-Down Methods That Didn’t Work

The conventional equations for weight loss may seem straightforward, but they’re certainly not universally applicable. It can feel next to impossible to drop weight when starting with a 280-pound physique of eight percent body fat.

With that much hard-won muscle on her frame, Tuft found that prevailing weight loss tactics didn’t work for her own slim-down success.

The Wrong Way to Train

To start her recomposition attempts, Tuft sought out and followed several pieces of training advice, from tedious rounds of cardio to high-volume lifting with light weights. But none of those strategies paid off.

“I hired personal trainers even though I was one,” Tuft tells BarBend. “I was like, well, maybe these guys know something I don’t. And basically, they all said the same thing.”

They said ‘I need you to do lightweight high reps.’ Well, it got me nowhere.

“I still tried going to the gym. I was doing cardio. I tried doing circuit training. I tried doing kettlebells. I tried doing resistance bands. I tried it all, and nothing worked.”

Editor’s Note: The dominant research on hypertrophy — and virtually everything else in the fitness realm, including nutrition —remains focused on cisgender athletes. In 2022, BarBend’s first research grant award went to funding a research effort out of Saint Louis University titled The TRANSforming Power of Strength Sports and Nutrition.

In the grant application, research lead Whitney Linsenmeyer, Ph.D, Registered Dietitian (R.D.), and Licensed Dietitian (L.D.) wrote: “Our proposed project addresses a twofold problem: strength training and nutrition guidance tailored to the unique considerations of transgender athletes is lacking, and sport culture is not often trans-inclusive.”

BarBend will keep readers updated about this research and how it may inform the training and nutrition programs of trans and nonbinary athletes.

The Wrong Way to Eat

In terms of nutrition, too, often-touted advice just wasn’t doing the job for Tuft. Even as a licensed sports nutritionist and certified personal trainer, she wasn’t seeing the results she wanted.

Outside of the gym, she devised a nutrition plan that she believed would help her drop a lot of body weight in short order. Even after employing a stiflingly restrictive approach to calorie cutting, Tuft found herself becoming frustrated as most of the stubborn weight simply refused to budge from her body.

“The personal trainers said, ‘We need to put you in a calorie deficit,’” Tuft explains.

I was getting hungry all the time, so I’d go scarce and then I’d binge because my body couldn’t handle it.

“My weight would tick down a little bit, and I’d lose some pounds because I was in these big calorie deficits that these so-called nutritionists would put me in, and then my weight would rebound because it’s just not sustainable.”

Tuft is not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. There is plenty of research to suggest that severe caloric restriction often results in binging behaviors, weight gain, and other nutritional and psychological dangers like disordered eating behaviors and nutritional deficiencies. (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)

Flexible, more gradual approaches to weight loss have been shown to be safer overall and more effective at promoting long-term, sustainable weight loss. (1)(2)(3)(9)(10)

Research further suggests that physique-focused athletes experience better mental health outcomes and reduced risk of disordered eating habits when they use a more intuitive eating approach to nutrition rather than one based on restriction. (11)(12)(7)

Sustaining a Safe, Steady Slim-Down

Frustrated by what she perceived to be slow progress, Tuft went back to the drawing board. By poring over every shred of data she could analyze — and muscle atrophy studies in particular — Tuft concocted a plan that enabled her to lose 100 pounds and counting.

Tuft’s Theory of Muscle Loss

To get her body to respond the way she desired, Tuft coalesced several philosophies of weight loss. These include:

A ketogenic diet;
A stable caloric deficit;
Intermittent fasting; and
High-intensity cardio.

This combination is built around a strategy that Tuft intended to force her body to burn muscle as fuel.

In this nutritional state, Tuft reasons that doing cardio at a high intensity (going above 70 percent of her VO2 max) forces her body to run on ketones. She argues that the remaining fuel for her body is muscle, which she says accounts for her success.

While research suggests that keto diets may not produce meaningful fat loss, it’s important to remember that Tuft was aiming to lose muscle mass. While this goal fits Tuft’s desires — and perhaps those of other transfeminine athletes — significantly reducing muscle size is not commonly prescribed and is likely under-researched. (13)(14)(15)

The Way Tuft Trains

To maintain a steady loss of muscle mass, Tuft developed a training routine of high-intensity cardio and avoiding intense muscle contractions by any means necessary. By adopting this aggressive approach to discarding muscle, Tuft finally began losing weight at a consistent, safe, and manageable pace.

That was this light bulb that went off.

“After looking at the results of the studies, I reverse-engineered it,” Tuft explains. “I realized that any time I put tension on my muscles at all, in any way, I was putting tension on my upper body muscles and they weren’t going to atrophy. That included if I was carrying a weight around the gym, or if I gripped the handles to work my legs and my butt on a machine.”

[Read More: What Is the Keto Diet and Should You Try It?]

The Way Tuft Eats

Tuft concedes that her initial approach to dieting for a slim-down proved to be both unsustainable and potentially dangerous. However, she reports that her subsequent method of sustaining ketosis and limiting her window of food consumption to eight hours has helped her achieve her desired results.

Basically, I don’t have any refined carbs or refined sugars in my diet, and I eat a ton of green cruciferous veggies with every meal.

“I’m trying to lose muscle mass, so I have to go with lower protein while staying in a healthy range so that my organs and body function properly,” Tuft says. “So for somebody trying to duplicate this, you want to be in a healthy range with your protein. And then I have healthy fats that go with it.”

[Read More: Can You Eat Intuitively as a Bodybuilder?]

Tuft’s Food Choices

Since Tuft’s efforts are tailored to force muscle mass to dissipate, she has adopted a minimalist approach to protein consumption. That means her goal is to consume the bare minimum amount of protein necessary to enable her body to function properly. She also consumes vegetables and healthy fats in high volumes.

“I get healthy fats and I get veggies in every meal I eat throughout the day, and I’ll eat five or six times,” Tuft explains. “I’ll have probably three good meals and a couple of small snacks in between.”

Tuft’s Slim-Down Menu

Baby food packets
Broccoli
Carrots
Cabbage
Green Salads
Avocados
Olives
Olive oil
Avocado oil
Coconut oil
Almond butter
Cashews
Walnuts
Chia seeds
Hemp seeds

How to Mentally Prepare Yourself to Slim-Down

It can be very emotionally turbulent when someone of any gender attempts to change their body shape and size to match a particular mental image. For trans people, this pressure is often felt even more keenly. Society at large and individuals may refuse to recognize someone for who they are if their body doesn’t look like the dominant culture expects it to.

Research has found that trans, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse people are disproportionately likely to develop eating disorders. (16)(17)(18) Disordered eating habits may be an attempt to cope with gender dysphoria and not having one’s body match what society expects from their gender. (16)(17)(18)

Current science also suggests that minority stress — that is, the extreme stress resulting from the immense pressure and stigmatization of belonging to a community that experiences oppression — may contribute significantly to disordered eating habits among trans people. (17)

In the midst of this pressure, the desire for “results” can be incredibly intense and feel quite urgent; a matter of psychological and physical safety. But in the world of fitness and nutrition, “fast results” are often not attainable — and when they are, they may not be safe or sustainable.

As such, Tuft wants to ensure that her fellow trans people approach their transitions with a reasonable set of expectations for physical transformation. However, her insights can be valuable to athletes of all genders.

Establish Achievable Goals

Before beginning her slim-down measures, Tuft understood that limitations would be imposed on the scope of her weight loss because she underwent puberty under the primary influence of testosterone — a hormone associated with men.

As a result, Tuft says she has benefitted from establishing reasonable expectations about what her body would look like in its post-transition form.

“Because I transitioned so late in life and not when I started puberty, my hips will never spread like those of a [woman assigned female at birth],” Tuft says. “It’ll never happen. I’ll never naturally have that hourglass figure, no matter how much muscle I lose. So the only solution is to gain a bunch of body fat, have them suck it out of my tummy, and put it into my butt and hips. And my goal is not to have a ridiculous spectacle of a booty, but I do want to have the right proportions.”

Set Realistic Expectations

Tuft understood that she would not emerge from surgery already matching the idealized body image she had for herself. People who undergo any kind of gender-affirming surgery require time for their bodies to adapt.

As difficult as it can be, this makes patience essential for people receiving gender-affirming medical care. That patience is required to prevent unrealistic slim-down expectations from leading to dangerous behaviors.

I had almost six months of binge eating to the point where I would be so full I would throw up.

“I wouldn’t make myself throw up,” Tuft explains. “It would just happen. It’s because when you starve yourself or you put yourself in a monster calorie deficit, the body, the mind, the central nervous system, and the gut biome, they all freak out at the same time and it’s not sustainable. So the key is always a small calorie deficit. If you can do that…you’ll get there eventually.”

The Best Is Yet to Come

With Tuft inexorably approaching her ultimate slim-down target, she is close to putting the finishing touches on a remarkable personal achievement. Still, the question remains whether or not she would ever aim for the historical achievement of making a return to the wrestling ring. As she is quick to point out, it would be “history in the making” if she were ever to step inside a WWE ring ever again.

“When I left the WWE, I was told the door was always open, and I will say that I definitely miss being in the ring,” Tuft says. “If I were to get back into the ring in a televised fashion in any way, shape, or form, I’m the only WWE superstar to transition to female, so it would be a shame to let that opportunity pass by.”

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Featured Image: @gabbituft / Instagram

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