Tracy Cortez had to find a bizarre way out of cutting her hair to make weight for the main event of the UFC Fight Night Denver. Eventually, she lost to former two-time UFC Women’s Strawweight Champion and hometown hero Rose Namajunas, securing a unanimous decision win. But Cortez would not have to make the sacrifice, had Namajunas’ original opponent, Maycee Barber, not pulled out two weeks ahead of the fight. But why did ‘The Future’ withdraw?

In a recent Instagram post, Barber revealed the reasons behind her withdrawal. She shared a picture of herself along with a long caption. Therein, the #4 UFC women’s flyweight fighter, revealed that she was hospitalized for 9 days after she fought Katlyn Cerminara at UFC 299. Back then, she claimed, that the medical professionals weren’t able to diagnose what went wrong. But later, the flyweight developed pneumonia. Needless to say, the antibiotic therapy took a toll on her body. 

When she found out that she would have recovered by July, she accepted the fight against Namajunas. However, troubles with her health returned when she tried to go deeper into the training camp. She confessed that she just couldn’t keep it going for five intense rounds. Despite that, she tried to keep pushing.

Barber wrote, “ Although I tried to keep pushing through, my team recognized that I’m not just not physically even close to where I need to be to safely enter a fight let alone into a single training session without putting myself at risk for lifelong damage. I needed to find answers as to why my body is seemingly turning against me.”

But as she took the tests, she got to know that she was infected by Epstein-Barr virus. The virus is quite infamous for causing complications that induce swelling in the cardiac muscles and is indeed linked to an increased risk of cancer. But for Barber, it was body aches, headaches, fatigue, and inability to recover between training sessions. She continued, “I keep trying to push through the fatigue, but every time I would I do so, I would get symptoms that were consistent with these lab findings.”

Indeed, a heavy dose of multiple antibiotic therapy has the potential to unsettle one’s immune system and compromise the human biome. With the consistent training, she got sicker by the day. She said, “After I was informed of the severe risks of my spleen rupturing among other life altering risks I was devastated.”

Taking all these into consideration, Barber’s coaches, doctors, and UFC decided to step back to ensure her well-being and keep her UFC hopes alive. While it indeed came as a disappointment for the enthusiasts, ‘Thug Rose’ was also on the same page. There was a bit of personal rivalry between the two fighters that dates back to their time training within similar circles in Colorado. 

“What I do remember very vividly is her [Barber] fighting a couple of my training partners and her beating those training partners and really just trying to throw that in my face as if she’s beating me or something, and then she would call me out or something and saying she’s knocking off my training partners and I’m next,” Namajunas had said recalling the tiff. So it was a fight that both were waiting eagerly.

There was a time when both fighters used to fight in strawweight. But Barber had to move to flyweight because of complications related to weight cuts. She pulled off a six-fight winning streak there. Eventually, Namajunas also moved to that category. After the fight was confirmed, Rose had rekindled the old rivalry, saying that she was “coming for her [Barber] rank”.

Understandably, she looked at it as a lost chance after their fight was canceled. “I don’t have anything personal against her, but the competitor inside of me, it’s like, yeah, I really wanted to show her what’s up,” Rose had said after learning about the pull-out. While we do not know how bad Barber’s health condition is, things took a really serious turn in 2019.

The weight-cut horror that almost floored Barber

Maycee Barber started off winning her debut MMA bout in November 2018 in the strawweight category. But the extreme dietary restriction and weight cut she had to go through for this came to light in 2019. The diet she had to follow to make 115 pounds could have taken a toll on her long-term health. So in February 2019, with the assistance of the UFC Performance Institute, Barber decided to move up to the flyweight category. It all started in the early stages of her career.

Before her debut in MMA, when she was training with Jackson-Wink MMA in Albuquerque, her team collectively decided that strawweight was her ideal weight class. According to Barber, she was limited to a calorie intake of between 500 and 800 per day. Alongside, she had to attend multiple training sessions per day, which made her life miserable. But she religiously stuck to that.

Moving on from Jackson-Wink MMA, she started working with Perfecting Athletes. Eventually, she teamed up with nutritionist George Lockhart. But even after all the changes, she was “never on over 1,000 to 1,200 calories per day”. That was too little for an athlete who has to attend multiple training sessions a day. It made things difficult during her debut in MMA. Despite winning against Hannah Cifers in a dominant second-round TKO, Barber felt all was not good.

She traveled to Las Vegas to get in touch with the experts at the UFC Performance Institute. The revelations left her beyond shocked. “I found my metabolic rate was down by 50 percent. I should be burning around 1,500 calories a day doing nothing, but mine was 700 or 800. My metabolism had been wrecked. I lost a lot on the hormonal side of things including my cycle. I lost a lot of things that are normal human functions. My brain, cognitive functions, my mood was awful all the time,” Barber had explained in 2019. So what came next?

Barber was put into a “drastic reverse diet.” The results were visible quickly. Her body and mind started to heal. When she returned to the UFC Performance Institute after six weeks for a follow-up, her reports spelled out her newfound well-being. Understandably, going for flyweight was a natural choice for her. Bouncing back from that debacle, she has become one of the most impressive prospects of UFC with a record of 14 wins and 2 defeats. It remains to be seen how quickly she gets over her present health condition to rule the octagon again.