By David Lar: Though Ricky Hatton would be the last to admit it, he may be dramatically shortening his boxing career by his tendency to overeat in between fights and balloon up in weight. I think rather than his defensive problems and his all out style of fighting, it’s his constant fluctuating weight that has led to his struggles in the ring in the past two years. Hatton likes to live well in between fights, perhaps a little too well, eating all the wrong foods and quite a bit of it judging from the huge amount of weight he puts on. He makes it worse by drinking beer which compounds the problem.

There’s nothing wrong with having a big meal on occasion along with beer, but when it becomes a routine that leads to a lot of weight gain, it’s a problem that needs to be looked at seriously. It’s not a good thing to do for a regular person, because it eventually leads to things such as heart disease, strokes and diabetes. However, for a professional athlete who depends on his body to carry him through fights, it’s an insane thing to do, something that clearly shortens the career of the athlete.

In Hatton’s case, he has so much talent that he’s been able to get away with it. Like baseball player Babe Ruth, who dominated the sport of baseball despite eating and drinking constantly and becoming quite overweight, Hatton has followed along in the same footsteps as him.

The difference with Hatton, however, is that he has always been able to get serious when it came to training for a fight, staying away from his binge eating and drinking of alcohol, and taking off the weight. The problem with this is that it turns his training camps, which were meant to work on sharpening his boxing skills, into a mini-fat farm where he has had to focus on taking off weight at the same time trying to work on his skills.

If you’re 30-40 pounds overweight, it’s got to be difficult to be able to effectively work on getting the rust off your skills when you have all that fat to deal with it the same time. When a fighter takes off a huge amount of weight, whether it be fat or muscle, they are naturally going to be considerably weaker for having done that. This is got to be happening to Hatton, having a huge negative effect on his performances.

So far, he’s been lucky to have only have been beaten by Floyd Mayweather Jr., because with his eating problems weighing him down, Hatton could have easily have been beaten by Luis Collazo and Juan Lazcano, two fighters I doubt would have given Hatton any trouble whatsoever three years ago before his eating issues began surfacing. When you look at Hatton face after he takes off the weight, there’s a great deal of loose skin hanging off his face, and it makes him look quite a bit older than his 29 years. You can expect that will get worse as he ages and gets even bigger between fights.

Worse, however, is what might happen when Hatton retires from the sport. Without the occasional training camp to whip him into shape, one could expect that he might continue to get bigger and bigger as he eats without control and grows morbidly obese.

Unfortunately, Hatton may not be aware of the side effects of growing obese and won’t know until he winds up with diabetes or suffers a minor heart attack. It’s serious business not just for his athletic career but for his life. Hopefully, someone close to him can make him understand that he needs to make some quick changes to his life, because otherwise both his career and his life may be shortened in a big way.