Lee on cutting weight for UFC 216: 'I was kind of out of it'

Everything was going well until it wasn't.

In a recent appearance on Chael Sonnen's "You're Welcome" podcast, lightweight contender Kevin Lee detailed the grueling weight cut he put himself through to make the divisional limit for an interim title bout with Tony Ferguson at UFC 216 this past weekend.

Lee said he began his cut with about 20 pounds to shed, as per usual, and woke up just a handful shy of the 155-pound limit the morning of the card's weigh-ins. But relieved as he'd been by his progress, the final stretch of the ritual didn't go nearly as swimmingly, leaving him one pound over the limit in his first trip to the scales.

"The first three hours I only got a pound off," Lee said, per Jed Meshew of MMA Fighting. "Put yourself in my shoes, it's 8:00, the weigh-ins start at 9:00, and I've still got five pounds to cut; so they're literally throwing boiling water into the hot tub with me because I've got to get it off now, get it off quick ...

"So right around 10:30 is when the doctor came up and we were still a pound-and-a-half over and he was saying I had to weigh in by 11:00 and then they'd give me the extra hour. I was hoping that somehow their scale was off and they would just give me the pound. I was hoping and I was praying but it was what it was."

The 25-year-old - who later revealed he'd been battling a staph infection as well - was medically cleared to cut the extra pound over the next hour, and hit the mark to salvage UFC 216's main event, but as he told Sonnen, the effort did quite a number on him.

"That last hour that I had to cut that extra pound, I don't even know how I got it off. I don't know where I was. Your mind just doesn't want to work when you're in those kind of states ...

"Like I said, I don't even remember much. I don't really know. I was kind of out of it and I just left it up to my coaches and they got the job done."

The cut gone wrong, the infection and inherent stress of his first world title bout admittedly affected Lee's performance. He ultimately lost to Ferguson by third-round submission.

"Once I actually made the weight, as soon as I sat down I was more exhausted than I - I don't think I've ever really felt like that in my life. I was carrying the stress of the whole event too so it was a lot."

As for whether he'll move up in weight to spare his body the damage of a longstanding, yet much-maligned practice, Lee said he won't decide his next move until he's recovered from a heavy workload, having fought four times over the past 11 months.