Serena Williams, 44, has revealed that the Serena Williams training diet skips breakfast entirely, with her first meal arriving around midday, a pattern she says is built around her body’s needs rather than convention. The details emerged in an interview published by People on Friday.
“I’m not really a breakfast person, so my first meal is usually around lunchtime. I’ll start with protein, have something lighter before I train, and then make sure I have a more substantial meal afterward to recover,” Williams told People.
How Serena Williams training diet is structured around recovery
The sequencing Williams describes, protein at the midday opener, a lighter pre-training snack, then a heavier post-training recovery meal, reflects a pragmatic approach to fuelling performance rather than adhering to a fixed eating schedule. When competing, she says the focus sharpens further. “When I’m competing, I’m focused on eating what I need to feel strong and perform my best, but I also believe in enjoying yourself. It’s all about balance,” she said.
That balance includes her surroundings. At the US Open, she told People, the city’s food culture is hard to resist. “New York has some of the best food in the world, so it’s impossible not to indulge a little when I’m there,” she said.
One consistent indulgence stands out. “I love tacos,” Williams said, and that affection runs deeper than a passing preference. Super Hero Jacked has previously reported that during off-season periods Williams lists tacos alongside beignets and pizza with chips as her diet “cryptonites,” and has admitted to eating a taco daily for lunch during those stretches. The current interview suggests the taco habit has not faded, even when training is active.
Dinner is family time, not a fuelling window
Alongside the training-focused structure of her daytime eating, Williams draws a clear line around the evening meal. She said she tries to cook for her daughters, Olympia and Adira, every night, because “that meal is less about what I need for training and more about sitting down together as a family.” Quality time at the table, she said, matters to her independently of any nutritional calculus.
Skipping breakfast, as Williams does, is not unusual among high-performing athletes, and the nutritional evidence is less clear-cut than older guidance suggested. Research has shown that eating breakfast is associated with benefits such as weight loss and more stable blood sugar levels. At the same time, skipping it can function as a form of intermittent fasting, which is itself associated with a lower risk of chronic illness and better blood sugar control.
Bonnie Taub-Dix, a registered dietitian and nutritionist, told Business Insider that the question is ultimately individual. “The timing of your day depends on schedule and your digestion. Some people should eat earlier, and some might not feel hungry in the morning,” she said.
Williams is not the only athlete to report this pattern. Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen said in July 2025 that he does not usually get hungry in the mornings. “Sometimes I don’t eat breakfast, and I don’t follow the intermittent fasting diet,” he said. New York Knicks player Karl-Anthony Towns told Business Insider that he is “not a big breakfast guy” and knows many others who share the preference. His alternative: 16 ounces of water followed by black coffee, MCT oil, and chicken bone broth.
Williams’s approach, skipping breakfast, anchoring meals around training, and keeping tacos in rotation, underlines that elite athletic nutrition rarely maps neatly onto standard dietary templates. The People interview, published on Friday, gives the fullest public account yet of how she structures her eating across a typical training day.