Wrestler weighs in on discipline

Attention all University of Pennsylvania students. Feel the need to shed some pounds?

Forget ‘The Zone.’ Forget crazy liquid diets that make you feel like a human waste disposal facility.

Penn junior 174-pound wrestler Scott Giffin has you covered.

In order to drop from his natural heft of 195 pounds down to his wrestling weight of just 174, Giffin has instituted a serious diet and workout regimen.

“The biggest part is drinking a lot of water,” Giffin said. “A few years ago Oprah did the whole water weight loss thing. It works.”

Giffin contends that staying hydrated throughout the day can not only “clean your system out” — gross — but can also speed up the metabolism and help burn off calories.

This strategy flies in the face of conventional wrestling weight-cutting, in which athletes dehydrate themselves to the point of passing out in order to drop a few extra pounds.

But Giffin understands — as surprisingly few high school and collegiate wrestlers do — that starvation and dehydration have more of a negative than positive effect on performance.

Traditional thought dictates that wrestlers should lose the pounds in whatever way possible.

Giffin contends that this method is self-defeating.

In order to avoid losing strength and quickness, he eats small, healthy meals in place of starvation.

“I like just having three steady meals,” Giffin said. “Eating late at night just puts people under.”

So that means no more trips to Wawa at 3 a.m., no more Campusfood deliveries and no more Jimmy John’s.

According to Giffin, keeping the metabolism running as efficiently as possible is the best way to get the weight to drop off quickly.

And of course, this means exercise — and lots of it.

“You have to work out, it’s plain and simple,” Giffin said.

And work out he does.

Giffin starts every day with some type of strenuous exercise, be it weightlifting or wrestling practice. He stresses that this is an important time to get the body up and running so that whatever food is ingested throughout the day is used and not stored.

“Your body just wants to hold on to energy,” the Berlin, N.J., native said. “You’re not just going to sit around and lose weight.”

So all of those miracle diets clogging TV ad space — you know, the ones that always say ‘Results not typical’ and ‘Not evaluated by the FDA’ — are just too good to be true.

Eat steady, small meals, cut out unnecessary calories like soda, snacks and late-night eating and, of course, exercise like crazy.

That’s what Giffin does.

It seems to work.

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