MakeWeightAI Official Blog

Across the country, high school wrestlers push their bodies to the edge, running in layers, sitting in saunas, or refusing food and water just to make weight, often to the point of physical or mental exhaustion. With over 374,000 high school wrestlers in the United States, what seems like a simple issue has escalated into a normalized but extremely dangerous culture. Even more concerning was how little access people had to reliable nutrition information or proper supplementation. Many athletes simply don’t have the privilege or funding to work with nutrition coaches, leaving them to rely on word of mouth, trial and error, or outdated advice. That gap is what led me to start MakeWeightAI, an AI-driven health consulting platform designed to help wrestlers make weight safely and effectively for free.

When I started the app, I knew the building process would be a challenge, requiring me to build accurate plans and personalise recommendations to make the system work seamlessly. What I didn’t expect was how quickly I would run into the limits of simply being “correct”.  Even when presented with better options, some athletes defaulted to what they knew. Under pressure to make the platform both useful and realistic, I had to rethink my approach. I started redesigning for behavior. I gave users the ability to swap out foods based on preferences or dietary restrictions, ensured every recommendation stayed within safe, research-backed limits, and built a conversational interface that let anyone fine-tune their plan and replicated the experience of a real-life nutritionist.

Building MakeWeightAI pushed me to move beyond just identifying a problem to understanding the individuals within it. But the platform is only the beginning. My goal is to make MakeWeightAI the standard resource for weight management in combat sports I want it to become something coaches recommend, schools adopt, and athletes trust by name. We are actively bringing free educational presentations to gyms and high schools across the Pacific Northwest, partnering with coaches and content creators to reach athletes where they already are, and building a research-backed education library that puts real science in the hands of people who need it, and this is something I want to expand nationwide. Ultimately, I want to see a world where no young athlete has to figure out weight cutting alone, where the dangerous practices that have been normalized for decades are replaced by something better, and where access to that something better is never a question of money or privilege. MakeWeightAI is how we get there.