Jul 6, 2020

It's 3 in the afternoon, and Joe Thomas needs to eat. He is driving with his family, but he is making them hungry. Is it really hungry? He does not know it. Throughout his entire NFL career as an offensive tackle with the Cleveland Browns, Thomas was conditioned to eat every two hours, because his job literally depended on it.

Thomas finds a McDonald's on the GPS. It'll be quick, just a little fuel between lunch and dinner. He orders two double cheeseburgers, two McChickens, a double cheeseburger, an order of large fries, and a large Dr. Pepper.

"Or another sugary drink," he said recently. "Just to add 500 calories, the easy way."

It wasn't easy playing 10,000 snaps in a row or fending off the most explosive pass-rushers in football. But it was just as difficult for Thomas to maintain a 300-plus-pound frame. He had to consume an insatiable amount of food.

This is an average day in the life of him:

"If I had gone two hours without eating, I would have literally cut off your arm and started eating it," the former offensive lineman said. "If I felt like I missed a meal after two hours I was going to lose weight and I was going to get in trouble. That was the mindset I had. We were weighed in on Mondays, and if I lost 5 pounds, my trainer was going to make me suffer."

Overeating is not as glamorous as it seems. In fact, laborious might be the best word. Throughout his career, Thomas woke up in the middle of the night chewing antacid pills. He was dependent on painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and he had constant heartburn.

Thomas then retired in 2018. "When you start eating and exercising like a normal human being," Thomas said, "the health benefits are incredible." Not only did he throw away the medications, but his skin cleared up, his yoga practice improved, and he felt less bloated. In six months, he lost 60 pounds from his playing weight of 325 pounds. In September 2019, TMZ noted Thomas' transformation, headlining an article: "Former NFL Fat Man...LOOKS LIKE A CHISELLED GREEK GOD."

"He just gave me a lot of laughs," Thomas said. "Isn't that the typical life for linemen? Eleven years in the NFL, and all I'm known for now is being the ex-NFL fat boy."

Thomas is the latest example of an offensive lineman who, after retiring, recommitted to a normalized, healthy lifestyle after overeating and overmedicating during his NFL career. His journey may seem dramatic, but it is not uncommon.

San Francisco 49ers tackle Joe Staley, who played in the most recent Super Bowl, has already donated five bags of clothes and bought new belts since his waist dropped from 40 inches to 36 inches and he lost 50 pounds. Former Baltimore Ravens guard Marshal Yanda dropped 60 pounds in three months by going from 6,000 calories a day to 2,000. Nick Hardwick, Jeff Saturday, Alan Faneca and Matt Birk are all former greats who now look like a shadow of their former selves, drawing tabloid attention. The list goes on and on.

How did they do it? We interviewed nine retired offensive linemen about what they had to do to get ripped and their secrets to slimming down after hanging up their football cleats. Players were candid about body image insecurities, outrageous diets, struggles with eating disorders, and the short- and long-term health ramifications of maintaining their playing weight for so many years.

Training yourself to have an eating disorder

Former offensive tackle Jordan Gross started 167 games in 11 seasons for the Carolina Panthers. He was a three-time Pro Bowler, making the All-Rookie team in 2003 and starting at right tackle for the Panthers in Super Bowl XXXVIII. He then retired in 2014 and lost 70 pounds in six months.

"Fans know me more for losing weight than anything I've done in my entire career," Gross said.

While that kind of weight loss can be inspiring, it also points to the unhealthy relationship with food that many offensive linemen develop, often going back as far as college. Faneca, a first-round pick by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1998 who went on to have 201 career starts with three teams, remembers his position coach at LSU punishing the entire offensive line once for "looking like a bunch of stuffed sausages." ", challenging them to lose a pound a day. Later, they told him that he needed to gain more weight.

Thomas put it bluntly: "You're training yourself to have an eating disorder the way you view food when you're in the NFL, and to try to deprogram that is a real challenge." Body image and self-esteem issues can become acute as these athletes are told that their worth can essentially be measured in calories and pounds.

"I always had this insecurity of being big when it came to dating life, talking to women and going out, being a 300-pound man," former Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Atlanta Falcons center/guard Joe Hawley said. "I didn't want to be that big, but I had to because I loved football and that was my job."

Much of the weight is artificial. As Gross points out, "not many people are naturally that big," but getting big was essential to playing at the highest level and earning millions of dollars. Gross, for example, ate an enormous amount of protein each day while playing, including six pieces of bacon, six scrambled eggs, two 50-gram protein shakes, four hard-boiled eggs, and two chicken breasts, all before 2 a.m. afternoon.

It's a somewhat new phenomenon, according to Dr. Archie Roberts, a 1965 Jets draft pick who became a heart surgeon. In 2001, Roberts co-founded the Living Heart Foundation, which annually conducts health screenings for retired football players. "In the 1990s there was a push that suggested to some people that gaining weight might make it a more effective and exciting game," Roberts said. "Because the bigger offensive linemen could hold the defensive offense longer so the quarterback could then throw the ball deep, which led to more spectacular passing plays."

Weight playing began to become popular throughout the league, especially on the line. According to Elias Sports Bureau research, the average weight of starting offensive linemen was 254.3 pounds in 1970. It rose to 276.9 in 1990, but the biggest increase in weights would come over the next 10 years. A decade later, the average offensive line starter checked in at 309.4 pounds. Today the number is 315, more than 60 pounds more than 50 years ago.

Hawley typically played between 295 and 300 pounds, but during his fifth year in the league, he adopted the paleo diet and ate clean. He lost 10 to 15 pounds and played the following season at 285. "It was hard to keep the weight off eating clean that way, but I felt much better," Hawley said. "He had so much energy; I wasn't that lethargic." Then he re-signed with Tampa Bay.

"Because they were pushing me playing offensive line like that, they told me I needed to put on weight," Hawley said. "So I started a slightly less healthy diet, which made me feel, well, not so good. But it's what I had to do to play."

"Being skinny as a lineman wouldn't help, because you'd have to create more force to stop those big guys," Thomas said. "Inertia becomes an issue. 'I'm a big fat guy, you're running at me, I don't have to create as much force because I'm heavier, fatter and have more mass.'"

The benefits of losing weight

Although that mass helps on the field, health complications can follow. In May, USA Today ran an entire column wondering if offensive linemen were more susceptible to serious complications from COVID-19 because of their size. Roberts warns that massive weight gain can also lead to obesity. "Which then affects their heart, lungs, kidney and their minds," Roberts said. "It's not proven, but it may also be associated with Alzheimer's and possibly traumatic brain injury." Once athletic careers are over, many players must assess whether it's worth carrying the extra pounds. Many have decided to downsize.

Faneca, the longtime Steelers guard, remembers the day he reached the goal of losing 30 pounds. He was playing on the floor with his daughter and he got up without having to do the “old man grunt.” “I just got up, no problem,” Faneca said. “And I was like, 'Wow, this is nice.'”

Thomas said that when he weighed 300 pounds, his body ached from standing for a few minutes. Gross said that he hated sweating. "He just sweated profusely all the time," he lamented. "My wife had hypothermia from my room being so cold all the time." Hardwick, a center with the then-San Diego Chargers who went as far as 308, said his initial motivation for losing weight was to take pressure off of his body. (According to the April issue of the Harvard Medical School newsletter, every additional pound you carry puts about 4 pounds of stress on your knee joints.)

"But then there's this material aspect," Hardwick said. "You want to be able to wear more 'cool' clothes, go into stores and start buying off the shelf. And that's seductive for a while. Then that wears off, and you get used to it, and people stop being impressed every time they see you. And you just feel more comfortable in your own skin again."

Staley, albeit sheepishly, admits that he likes the fact that his muscles are getting defined.

"As an offensive lineman, you're always known as a big, huge, unaesthetic mass," Staley said. "Offensive linemen get cast in a movie, and they're always 500 pounds. Then you get a chance to get healthy again, and all the effort you put into football, you put into that. It gives you focus once time you retire. It's a little vain, but I'm starting to see the abs I've always wanted. And it's kind of exciting."

The things we eat...

There are two types of offensive linemen: those who must artificially put on the pounds, and those who are naturally big.

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"I'm the latter," said Damien Woody, a former NFL lineman and current ESPN analyst. "I could literally breathe and inhale and put on 5 pounds." During a summer growth after his sophomore year of high school, Woody grew 6 inches and gained 70 pounds. By the time he got to Boston College, he already weighed 300. "It was never a problem for me to gain weight," he said.

The other group? Gaining weight can become a sport of consumerism, often beginning in college years. Consider Hardwick, who wrestled in the 171-pound weight class in high school. He enrolled at Purdue on a scholarship, tried out for the football team and skyrocketed to 295 pounds by eating 2 pounds of ground beef on multiple tortillas for dinner. Hardwick would also drink a 600- or 700-calorie protein shake before bed and set his alarm to drink a similar one at 3 a.m.

At this year's NFL combine, Ben Bartch was a topic of conversation after discussing his trusty shake: seven scrambled eggs, a large container of cottage cheese, grits, peanut butter, a banana and Gatorade. A daily dose of that mix added 59 pounds to Bartch's 6-foot-6 frame, helping him transform from a third-team Division III tight end in St. John's, Minnesota, to a fourth-round pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars as offensive lineman.

"I would mix it all up and then hold my nose," Bartch said. "In the dark. Sometimes it made me want to throw up. That's what you have to do sometimes."

Chris Bober, a former New York Giants and Kansas City Chiefs lineman, showed up at the University of Nebraska-Omaha at 225 pounds, which was too low. He ate everything he could get his hands on, which was difficult as a college student, "he was pretty tight on money." It was especially difficult during the summers, when he inherently burned calories on his construction job. If Bober went to Subway, he didn't just buy a foot-long sandwich, he bought two. At Taco John's, his order was a 12-pack of tacos and a pound of potato pancakes, adding up to a nearly 5,000-calorie lunch.

When Thomas was in Wisconsin, any player trying to gain weight could grab a 10-ounce to-go carton of heavy whipping cream with added sugars and whey protein after a workout. He guesses the drink was about 1,000 calories per carton, and he would top it off with a 50-gram protein shake on his way to class.

Like Hardwick, Staley - who went from 215 pounds to 295 at Central Michigan, as he went from tight end to offensive line - used to set an alarm for himself every day at 2 a.m. "He had these pre-made bulking shakes weight; it was probably 2,000 calories each," Staley said. "I would wake up in the middle of the night, take that, go back to bed." Although Staley worked with his college strength coach to ensure he was putting on "good weight"—gaining muscle without unnecessary body fat—unnatural eating habits took a toll. "I was bloated for four years straight," Staley said. "Do you know that when you overeat, after a really nice dinner at an Italian restaurant, you eat all these dishes and you walk away feeling gross? That's how I felt all the time in college."

Staley no longer fit into the clothes he arrived in Central Michigan in, but he couldn't afford to buy new ones, so he constantly borrowed teammates from him. Most offensive linemen admit they lived in team-issued sweatshirts. "I'm lucky, in the late 1990s, early 2000s, everything baggy was in style," Gross said. "So from 250 to 300, it wasn't a massive wardrobe change. The waist got big, but the elastic laces were my best friend."

The habits continue in the NFL. Many older players credit the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, which banned a twice-daily training camp, as a turning point. Before that, it felt like the college days of him. "If he was doing two a day, in the summer in South Carolina, facing Julius Peppers, he was burning 10,000 calories for sure," Gross said.

So at the end of each day at boot camp at Wofford College, Gross counted out 15 Mississippis at the ice cream machine, then mixed that with four cups of whole milk, plus three homemade chocolate chip cookies (which Gross thinks were about 850 calories each) and Hershey's chocolate syrup. "They're all inflammatory foods, like sugar and dairy," he said, "I'm not going to say it's horrible; it was pretty fun to eat those things. But you're putting so much demand on your digestive system. I was always gassy. I always had to go to the bathroom. I was bloated because I was full all the time."

Striving to be the biggest loser

There's a common refrain among offensive linemen: If you don't lose weight in your first year out of the league, you probably won't.

Four years after retiring, Woody weighed in at 388 pounds and agreed to appear on NBC's "The Biggest Loser." Instead of lifting heavy objects and concentrating on explosive snatches, Woody was asked to do longer cardio and resistance training. "It was totally different from what I had learned to do and trained to do all my life," Woody said. "And it was hard. It was very hard."

Woody lost 100 pounds on the show - and then put it all back on.

So he accepted the weight of it, until last year, when the 42-year-old renovated his basement into a workout room. "I wanted to lose weight the right way," Woody said. "In a sustainable way." Woody convinced his wife and children to join his mission. On Sunday nights, they prepare meals. And every day Woody goes down to the basement to stay active. He prefers the Peloton bike—"I hit it super hard," he said—but he also uses the rowing machine, and he does "all different types of exercises so I don't get bored."

Although he still lifts weights, he focuses on lighter options and higher reps. "I'm not putting any weight on my back anymore; I'm not lifting excessive weight to potentially hurt myself," Woody said. "Because that's not the point anymore." On June 14, Woody tweeted that he was down 50 pounds as of March 23 "and my joints are already jumping for joy."

Is not easy. And for many years, gamers have felt as if they were alone in their weight loss journey.

"The NFL doesn't give you any guidance on how to do it," Bober said. "They're like, 'OK, see ya.' You have to take it on yourself to find out. And as I've gotten older and older, I've noticed that it gets harder and harder to manage if you don't lose the weight right away."

Shortly after the last CBA in 2011, the NFL Players Association launched "The Trust," which interim CEO Kelly Mehrtens describes as a VIP concierge service of benefits that players can take advantage of as they transition out of the league. . As part of a holistic approach, the Trust invites players to Exos (where they can train, get physical therapy and undergo nutrition consultation), offers YMCA memberships and arranges physicals and specialist consultations at hospitals around the world. country.

The Trust, explains Mehrtens, is about figuring out why certain kids move on to their lives after playing more successfully than others, and how they might help bridge the gap. "These are earned benefits," Mehrtens said. "So we want to make sure the guys take advantage of something they've already earned."

The Dr. Roberts Living Heart Foundation, an NFLPA partner, conducts health screenings for former players three times a year. Anyone with a BMI of 35 or older is invited to join a six-month show called The Biggest Loser (although it's not televised). So far, approximately 50 players have gone through it. Most are in their 40s, with the oldest participant being in his 80s. "It just goes to show that it's never too late to find the motivation to reach your goals," Head Coach Erik Beshore said.

Beshore said most of those who signed up for The Biggest Loser show are diabetic or pre-diabetic. However, after six months, as they commit to sustainable lifestyle changes, many have come off their insulin, eliminated their blood pressure medication, sleep better and report better moods overall.

"It's amazing how many of them can lose weight all these years later," Roberts said. "But in terms of whether they can reverse the damage that may have occurred in the intervening period when they played football at big size years later, it's hard to quantify, because we don't have long-term data yet."

Live the healthy lifestyle

To lose weight, Staley cut out most carbs for vegetables. He's purged his house of his favorite vice, chips and salsa, and now snacks on raw broccoli and bitchin' salsa—a vegan, almond-based dip. Staley said he now eats purposefully and in moderation.

"In the NFL, he always ate when he was hungry and what was available," he said. "If it was salmon, great. If it was frozen pizza, I'd eat that too."

Hawley, who retired in 2018, donated most of his material possessions to charity and has been living out of a van and Airbnb around the country. He said it was all about reconditioning his brain to eat only until he feels full, and not eat until he can't eat anymore. Intermittent fasting has been a great tool for the 6-foot-3 Hawley, who has dropped 60 pounds to 240. He rarely eats breakfast and tries to fast 24 hours a week, eating dinner at 6 or 7 p.m., and then not eating until 6 or 7 pm the next night. He sometimes even challenges himself to a 36-hour fast.

Hawley has connected with other former greats, like Hardwick, whom he met at "Bridge to Success," an NFL transition program for retired players.

"But it's not as big of a community as I would like," Hawley said. "I'm actually working on creating an online community for guys. That's something I've been missing. I've spent my whole life being part of a locker room with a team and then you go into the real world at 30, and no one really knows what that experience is like."

Hardwick said he is working on an e-book with a blueprint of his diet plan for people who want to lose weight fast and keep it off.

Many players interviewed for this story said they feel better and like the way they look, rapid weight loss has led to unsightly stretch marks and excess, sagging skin (which one player, who wishes to remain anonymous, said he had been removed cosmetically). Hardwick and Gross also warn of something that happened to them: They became so obsessed with losing the weight that they took it too far.

Hardwick remembers weighing himself after a yoga class in January 2015. The scale read 202 pounds. Great, he thought to himself. "Another 3 pounds, and it will be 199." But then he saw his profile in the mirror, and he didn't recognize himself.

"If the apocalypse came, there was no way I could defend myself or my family," he said. Hardwick went home and began binge eating as if overcorrecting. He has hovered between 220 and 230 ever since, which he thinks is a healthy weight for him.

Gross experimented for a while. He was a vegetarian for a year and then tried the paleo diet. "You don't have clearance when you're playing, you just have to eat to keep the weight off," he said. "So I thought it was exciting to try different things." Once Gross dropped to 250, he noted immense relief from the pain in his feet and ankles, which had swollen his last few years in the league due to weight, not injury.

When Gross started his transformation, he went to Old Navy and bought three pairs of shorts and two polo shirts. He didn't know where his weight loss would take him, and he didn't want to waste money. Gross dropped as low as 225, but restricting himself to fewer than 2,500 calories a day didn't feel like a sustainable lifestyle. "That was too much," he said. As he prepares to turn 40 this summer, Gross eats about 3,200 calories a day and is back to lifting weights. He now happily hovers around 240 pounds.

As for Thomas? As his career ended, he began consulting with Browns nutritionist Katy Meassick, who began educating him on healthier habits. They came up with a post-retirement plan, which Thomas describes as "a low-carb diet, or a keto diet, with intermittent fasting." He added swimming and cycling as cardio, along with yoga.

Thomas, too, had to rewire his brain to stop eating when he was full. Throughout his sports career, he had taught his subconscious to go beyond that point and keep stuffing himself with orders of family-sized McDonald's and sugary drinks. It is a new kind of discipline. Now, every Monday, Thomas and his wife, Annie, try to fast for 24 hours.

Because of his previous line of work, it's not that difficult of a transition. "As an offensive lineman you do the hard work forever and you do the shit that no one wants to do. We're used to being in a truck in a dark room, and everyone expects us to go out there and perform for no glory at all." Thomas said.

"And you almost miss that misery. It's a weird thing to say, but going into the world of fasting and trying to discipline yourself and do something that's hard, in a weird, sick way, [that's something] that I think a lot of offensive linemen understand."