Kerry Kayes is the karate kid who keeps Ricky Hatton on the straight - and truly narrow – in the build-up for the title fight.
The man behind the science of dropping 40lb in quickfire fashion explains his dietary strategy, and there is not a steroid in sight.

Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter, in Las Vegas

The nutritionist who masterminds Ricky Hatton’s astonishing weight loss before bouts is a former British champion bodybuilder who used to take anabolic steroids. That fact may raise alarm bells, but Kerry Kayes calmly silences them. And for Hatton, his knowledge is invaluable.

But let us get the obvious question out of the way, to which the answer is no. “Because Ricky transforms from A to B, there is always going to be that question ‘I wonder what he’s on?’ ” Kayes said. “Of course steroids would have helped. But I would never dream of doing anything like that with him, Billy Graham [Hatton’s trainer] would never allow it and Ray [his father] would go barmy. I wouldn’t consider it.”

So, instead, he is faced with the prospect of taking about 40lb off Hatton legally, a science of which he has become an undisputed master. On day one of training before each bout, Kayes has little idea of the size of the man about to walk into the gym.

“To be truthful, I don’t know what he had to lose this time because for the first four weeks he wouldn’t even step on the scales,” Kayes said. “It was easily 40lb.” Herein lies the challenge, and Kayes relishes it. Formerly a bodybuilder, at present a gym owner and the managing director of a hugely successful supplements company, it seems that a lifetime’s knowledge has gone into conquering it.

Kayes was an electrician with Yorkshire Television until 20 years ago, when he quit and set up Betta Bodies, the gym in Denton, Manchester, where Hatton trains. Kayes had started training as an athlete when he was 16 and represented Great Britain at karate as well as bodybuilding, at which he became British champion in 1994.

In his early days as a competitor, he knew a young Arnold Schwarzenegger who spent six months sleeping on the settee of some bodybuilding friends of his in Bournemouth.

Kayes’s supplements company, CNP Professional, was started in 1998 and soon after that came a request from Graham. Kayes and Graham’s brother, Joe, another strength athlete, had known each other well before Joe’s death when he was hit by a car. But Billy remembered that Joe had spoken highly of Kayes and his knowledge about weight loss and asked Kayes if he could construct a diet for his promising young boxer, Hatton. It was thereafter that Graham moved his boxing gym into Betta Bodies and from mid-2002, Kayes was a permanent part of the team.

What Kayes had enjoyed about bodybuilding was “making my body abnormal, making it go against nature”. And that, he said, “Is also what I do with Ricky.” What he had not enjoyed about his former sport was “looking like a bodybuilder”. “I used to be embarrassed,” he said. “If I went out with my wife, I always used to wear baggy clothes. If I went to the beach I wore baggy T-shirts.

“There’s a lot wrong with bodybuilding. I’ll be honest, anabolic steroids play a big part in bodybuilding and I used them myself. But I’m quite a wise man, so I used to have blood tests and monitor my blood count to make sure I was OK. But whether you like or dislike the sport, bodybuilders are experts at gaining and losing weight.”

The challenge with Hatton is to shed all that weight in a short space of time while attaining world-class levels of strength and fitness. The reason that this “goes against nature” is because to reach his levels of conditioning, Hatton needs to take on board vast amounts of nutrients - which effectively means that he needs to eat like a king. But eating like a king would prevent him losing the weight so fast.

The solution from Kayes is a mind-boggling array of supplement powders. “Some 60-70 per cent of his nutrition comes through supplementation,” he said. For example, Hatton will take on 42g of protein (the building blocks of muscle) with a protein powder called ProMR, which contains 270 calories per serving and effectively replaces one meal; to have ingested that much protein naturally, Hatton would have had to eat 800 calories of normal food.

So, all pretty clever and great advertising for CNP, which turns over £10 million a year and is splashed all over Team Hatton’s uniforms. However, no one is kidding themselves that, in the long term, these enhanced weight-loss regimes are doing Hatton any good. They have all tried to persuade Hatton to keep his weight down between bouts.

“I sat him down and tried to explain it from a physiological point of view,” Kayes said. “And after about three minutes he said, ‘Shall we go out for a drink tonight and talk about it?’ ” The physiological point is that such yo-yoing on the scales will shorten Hatton’s timespan at his athletic peak. How do we know that it hasn’t eaten into that already? “I’m sure it probably has,” Kayes said. “I’m not making excuses for him, he’s in fantastic shape, but who knows what he could have been?”

Which takes us to Saturday. Can Hatton still do 12 rounds at the kind of tempo required to take Floyd May-weather Jr’s scalp? Kayes’s answer is that, “Honest to God, he’s in the best shape he has ever been in.”

The real answer will lie before us in the ring, because Hatton and all around him know that one day a diet of powders will not suffice.

The Kayes way:

ProMR Sachets of powder, high on protein and low on calories. Effectively a meal replacement.

Pro-Vital The Government recommends five portions of fruit and vegetables a day; these capsules help Hatton to get nearer to the equivalent of 15.

Pro-Recover Post workout powder drink; its carbohydrates aid muscle repair and growth.

Pro-Lipid Capsules high on Omega numbers; Hatton gets essential fatty acids without having to eat loads of fish.

Pro-GF NOx Powder drink, blend of amino acids, lactic acid buffers, glucose and vitamins intended to increase strength, performance and recovery.

Protein slams Ready-made liquid shot drink. High on CarnoSyn, which delays onset of muscle fatigue.