Former PFL lightweight champion Kayla Harrison, like other 155-pound titleholders before her, will cut all the way down to the bantamweight division in order to capture the biggest prize in mixed martial arts (MMA) — a big gold belt for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
But the process is likely to be “torture.”
“It’s torture,” Harrison told Ariel Helwani about cutting weight. “But everything I’ve wanted is on the other side of that torture. I feel like I become refined in the fire. It’s a very lonely process. It’s a much harder mental grind than I expected. First, it was this fear of, ‘Oh my gosh, can I do this?’ And now, it’s this fear of, ‘Oh my gosh, I know what I have to do in order to do this.’ It’s definitely not healthy. Don’t do this, kids. I do not recommend. My team is dialed in. It’s not easy but I believe in the end it will be worth it.”
The end comes against current UFC bantamweight champion Julianna Pena, who defends her 135-pound strap as part of the upcoming UFC 316 pay-per-view (PPV) event on June 7 in Newark. Harrison will co-headline the card, topped by the bantamweight rematch between Merab Dvalishvili (c) and Sean O’Malley.
“I want to have a lot of respect for Julianna because she’s a single mom, she’s a veteran of the sport, she scratched and clawed her way to the top, she believed in herself when nobody believed in her,” Harrison said about her Pena grudge. “I really wanna have admiration for her. I think probably deep down I do and I love that she’s confident and she says what she thinks, but she’s just pretty dumb sometimes. So, it’s hard, it’s difficult.”
Harrison is currently a -600 betting favorite.
