To four-time Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler, winning was everything. That’s why Cutler claims to have spent $50,000 per year on his bodybuilding diet at the height of his career.

The investment paid off. Not only did Cutler bag four Sandow trophies and carve his name into bodybuilding history, but he remains the only bodybuilder to reclaim the Mr. Olympia title after losing it to another athlete.

“I just didn’t want to lose. My fear of losing kept me going,” Cutler recalled while itemizing the cost of his bodybuilding diet, which included:

Four pounds of meat, daily

30 (thirty) dozen eggs each week

150 pounds of chicken on each trip to the grocery store

At times, an entire cow, which he froze and butchered himself

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Jay Cutler’s Bodybuilding Diet, Explained

Cutler explained the extreme measures he undertook with his bodybuilding diet during an Oct. 2022 appearance on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast. “People laughed at my monotonous eating style, but it’s just what I knew,” he recounted of his heyday at the top of the muscle game.

Cutler’s meal prep may seem outlandish to those unfamiliar with his sport, but his bodybuilding diet is par for the course for professional physique athletes who typically buy groceries in bulk to bulk up.

A 2015 literature review on competitive bodybuilders in contest prep found that physique pros exhibit “extremes in diet manipulation” in order to achieve their goals. (1) Bodybuilders like Cutler oftentimes push the boundaries of performance-based nutritional science faster than the scientific community can collect and interpret data.

[Related: “I’m Here, Motherf#@kers”: Jay Cutler Reflects on 2009 Quad Stomp]

Does that mean anyone who wants to build muscle needs to replicate Cutler’s bodybuilding diet? No, and especially not to the tune of 50 grand a year. But his story does highlight the lengths to which Mr. Olympia competitors will go to outdo each other on stage.

While talking with current Mr. “O” Derek Lunsford on a Jul. 29 episode of his podcast, Cutler recounted how his bodybuilding diet and workout routine culminated in nearly dethroning eight-time Mr. Olympia winner Ronnie Coleman.

“I never had anyone to tell me, ‘You’ve got this, you’re going to win,’” Cutler said.

Sure, Cutler had his bodybuilding diet locked in, despite the exorbitant price tag — but it wasn’t enough to beat Coleman in 2001 when he felt he had the best chance.

Cutler would go on to win his first Olympia title five years later in 2006, pushing Coleman down to second place. Was it worth the cool quarter-million in frozen cows and pallets of eggs? Yeah, probably.

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References

Spendlove, J., Mitchell, L., Gifford, J., Hackett, D., Slater, G., Cobley, S., & O’Connor, H. (2015). Dietary Intake of Competitive Bodybuilders. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 45(7), 1041–1063.

Featured Image: @jaycutler / Instagram

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