The Real-Life Diet of MMAShredded’s Jeff Chan, Who Eats a Lot of White Rice—and Popeyes

She likes to change it up, but fried rice, rice with steak, rice with beef, rice with pork—honestly anything. I don’t know about you or other people, but in the morning for breakfast, I like salty, hot food. Like sausage and eggs. I don’t like cereal.

I’m a salty, hot food guy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Right now, I’m not trying to lose weight since I don’t have a fight coming up. I’m just enjoying my life. And I actually want to be a little bit thicker, a little bit stronger and bigger. That’s why I’m allowing myself to eat the rice. But if I’m in fight camp or if I’m training for something, I actually do intermittent fasting and I don’t eat breakfast. I go into the training session kind of hungry, but I actually perform better.

Oh interesting. So you move a lot lighter and stuff.

Yeah. I feel a lot lighter. And although I’m hungry and it sucks, once you get in the rhythm, and you start sweating and start exercising, then you don’t really feel the hunger anymore.

Was the decision to not eat a lot of meat a recent thing? Or have you always been like that?

Just a natural thing. I’ll eat a lot of meat but it’s more important that I eat lots of rice, and I’ve been eating a lot of rice since I was a child. Everybody who meets me, more specifically my fiancee and her family, when they see me eat the amount of rice I eat, they’re like, “What the fuck?”

I feel that. Even when I eat Popeyes now I’ll eat it with white rice. Does caffeine factor in at all for you? Do you drink coffee in the mornings before training?

Nope. No coffee, no tea. I’ll drink tea if someone offers it, if I’m at a restaurant or whatever, but I don’t drink any caffeine at all.

Do you do pre-workout and stuff at all or—

No. I think I get all my energy from the rice.

What does your recovery routine look like?

I stretch a lot and foam roll a lot. I started stretching ever since I fell in love with those karate snap kicks. I try to do the splits every day now. I can’t do the splits, but I’m improving by literally stretching every single day, just for three sets of a minute or two.

Stretching has been a game changer. Just being able to bring that leg up for that high without as much effort changed everything. It makes everything so much more dangerous to be able to kick that high. And foam rolling, and massage gun, hitting the hips, hitting the butt. Whenever I have a friend over, he’ll literally use his elbow and dig into the hips before we work out.

Say we do deadlifts that day. We both understand how important it is, so that for two minutes, I’ll lie down and he’ll just dig his elbows into my butt, my lower back, my hips and just loosen me up. Then I’ll do the same for him. And then when we do deadlifts, everything is so much easier. It’s been a big, big, big game changer. I was actually thinking of making a video discussing the importance of foam rolling and just loosening up those muscles.

How do you go about your cardio? What’s your cardio routine?

I would say in the afternoon class, it’s cardio because it’s the jiu-jitsu team. So it’s usually live drills, live resistance training. So I usually get my cardio there. And then in the evening I’ll have a cousin or a friend come over and I usually try to film something. After we film we’ll usually hit pads, maybe like three [five minute rounds], not super hard, but just we’ll hit and get a sweat in. I would say I stay fit and lean primarily due to the physical activity that I do, not so much what I eat. If I stopped training as much and ate the way I ate, I believe I would get big.