The Heavy Secrets of NFL Weight Loss

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

I have a vivid memory of walking into an urban outfitters, looking up at one of the store employees, him seeing me, and just immediately shaking his head knowing, going back to folding clothes.

Right after this ad.

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Ryan Court says,

Happy New Year.

Do you know?

I hate being told Happy New Year.

It's one of my least favorite things to be told.

You're only allowed to say it to me on the first Monday of the year.

Sorry, too.

It's the first Tuesday of the year.

It's January 2nd, and you're already spoiling the entire premise of this episode.

I get annoyed, and

the second's one thing.

It infuriates me if I hear you say to me on January 8th or January 10th, which happens a lot.

Like January 15th rolls around, and you go to Target.

I'm still feeling festive about wanting to celebrate that.

It's a new opportunity for all of us to reevaluate ourselves, to make resolutions, to

where are you, by the way?

Speaking of encountering you, you're not even here right now.

Yeah, I'm at the home of one of the only exclusive Parakeet 69 jerseys, aka my house because you, Pablo Torre, got me sick.

That's where I am.

I'm at home.

That is slanderous.

I did not get you sick.

You can't prove that, at least.

But you are, in fact, for the podcast audience not watching on YouTube or the DraftKings Network, you are, in fact, sitting in front of a Parakeet 69 jersey on a hanger.

And an autographed Didonis Haslum jersey.

And I have multiple Parakeet 69 jerseys, if you indeed would like one for your own home.

I would not.

Okay, on the first episode of 2024, you are exactly the way you have been for the last like 30 years of your life.

Nothing about you has changed is what I'm saying.

33 to be specific.

Okay,

so what I wanted to be specific about was what I'm excited about today on the show, because despite you, I wanted to celebrate the people who actually in the world of sports seem to be the best as a category, as a position, as a tribe, as a fraternity at becoming

a better, improved version of themselves.

And I am talking, of course, about offensive linemen.

That was a deeply offensive intro where you accused me of being the opposite of the best and the opposite of somebody who wants to improve themselves.

Jesus.

But listen, all I'm saying is that you are no Alan Fanneca.

Remember Alan Fanneca?

Alan Fanuka was the Steelers Pro Bowl center.

And the Jets, that's right.

Yes, and the Jets played at around 316 pounds and now looks like this.

Okay,

this is a man who's lost, what, like 70 pounds thereabouts, and he's not alone.

It's remarkable.

Cortez,

you've watched ESPN and you've seen guys where you're like, who the f ⁇ is that guy?

And it turns out to be,

you know, Jeff Saturday.

Oh, yeah, no, Jeff Saturday is my classic example.

I mean, growing up, I watched him be Peyton Manning Center, and he was just huge.

He was a bowling ball.

And to see him just look like an entirely different person, he was the start for me of like, oh, so when you stop playing football, you might look like a a whole different person.

Yes, 300 pounds as a cult, now a fraction of that.

And again, it goes, go down the list.

I mean, Marshall Yonda with the Ravens, he's a totally different dude now, played at 305, is now like, you know, running races and shit.

The Pouncey brothers, those terrible twins, they've essentially lost an entire Pouncey brother collectively.

Russell O'Kun.

I mean, this was the most famous one, most recent one, maybe.

He was 310 with the Seahawks, with the Panthers, Panthers, went on this crazy fasting diet and changed himself.

And all of it reminds me that we just spent 2023 marveling, Cortez, on this show and elsewhere, about Ozempic, about Wegovi, these pharmaceutical scientific solutions to weight loss.

And the entire time, the most popular New Year's resolution has been embodied, pun intended, by the bodies of linemen.

They have been on this in a way that makes me want to ask questions about their secrets, their mysteries.

How are they doing this?

It's infuriating that the offensive lineman gets to be thick with two C's while they're playing.

And then the moment they stop playing, they get to be like dad bod, six pack, whatever, like no longer fat guy.

Can't have both.

Apparently they can.

Yeah, they have cut out the, what's that thing you eat you love eating?

They can't eat the...

What's that thing I love eating?

Croquetas?

Croquetas, yes.

They've cut out the croquet.

I mean, I presume, but I don't know for sure.

And so I enlisted the help of a very special Pablo Torre finds out correspondent, a member of this tribe that I am fascinated by, who will give us the secrets, the untold secrets of how it is that all of these dudes are somehow embodying the best version of all of us.

That is my New Year's resolution.

I want to start with that.

That's not your New Year's resolution.

I just want to point out, as someone who knows you well, I can spot your New Year's resolution.

And what it is, is that you're no longer wearing that silly blue cardigan that you wore 700 times.

And now you're wearing the Arthur outfits where you put your fists down and you look annoyed and I just want to say it is a great look for you you look fantastic it's an upgrade of what you used to wear yeah yeah yeah this is not a news resolution this is just another sweater I have it looks great all of the what's wrong with colors what's wrong with colors in a wardrobe What's wrong with colors is you used to wear a green master's jacket.

I'll give the producers a photo.

It was embarrassing.

It had like sparkles in it.

Okay.

It did not have sparkles in it.

The sparkles were what people's eyes had in them when they saw me resplendent in my green jacket.

Let's start this show.

We need to get to the next segment.

What's up, listeners?

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So, Mike Gullick Jr.

is here with me.

I'm thank you for being here in person.

No, glad to be here.

I mean, congratulations to you.

I haven't seen you since Pablo Torrey finds out became the biggest sports podcast in the world, even though

I'm not really sure if it's a sports podcast.

It's technically a sports podcast.

And this is technically an episode about sports, what we're about to do here.

yes.

But it is an episode, Mike, that I had at the near the top of my list when I was like figuring out what the this show is going to be.

And you were obviously going to be the guest.

And I just want people to understand why.

So, if you are not watching on YouTube or the Draftings Network, just know that Mike Golick Jr.

is looking just great.

I'm trying, man.

I wore the V-neck for you today just to really drive it home.

It is an intimidating angle.

I see it just again, you got to watch this, but they're like the

whispers of chest hair peeking out like a like a meerkat from your V.

Yeah, just every once in a while reminding you there.

Between the chest hair and the tattoos, all poorly placed from the time in my life before that we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about today, they're good reminders.

I like to leak out every once in a while, even though I have this baby body now.

I feel like we're gonna talk about leakage at some point today.

But I wanna actually talk about a photo that it feels like

you might have been mad if someone had leaked it, actually, because it's the photo.

You know the photo.

It's you.

It's Tom Brady.

Oh, yeah.

The ideal male form.

There's never been a photo that is better at illustrating almost like a before and after

or like two ends of a spectrum, if you don't mind me saying so.

Oh, yeah.

With 100% sincerity, I learned from my doctor what triglycerides were after a checkup around that time, and I saw the scales tip at 315 for me for the the first time in my life.

And what you see in the photo is Tom Brady's palpable disgust at just how I arrived at that point.

Yeah, just so many angles on Tom Brady and just so many curves.

Oh.

With you.

Voluptuous.

Truly Zophtig, I believe they used to say, like the 1920s.

It's giving a lot of old world wealth in that photo.

I want to establish, though, that your lineage here is, I mean, you're not new to this.

You are genetically true to this.

Yeah, no, come from a large family.

So, my

father and both of his older brothers all were collegiate football players at Notre Dame.

My dad and my uncle Bob both had, you know, my dad, a nine-year NFL career, my uncle Bob, a 14-year NFL career.

Both of them defensive linemen who worked their way from being linebackers in college to defensive tackle in my dad's case and to nose guard the final rung on the totem pole of large in in the NFL was my uncle Bob down there in the middle as he called it you're the fire hydrant at a dog show and he had the size to show for it but you know they were 300 plus pounds my uncle Greg who was the college football player and offensive lineman was six eight three hundred pounds my younger brother played tight end at Notre Dame so we're big people so just give me the mental image paint the picture for me please of like um you know it was just the holidays give me give me the sense of what it's like to be at the table as all of the as all of the golicks are assembled.

It's,

have you ever, you know, in Game of Thrones, the Battle of the Bastard scene where Jon Snow picks up the sword and is looking at the oncoming horde?

That's what the plates on the table see as we approach there.

They're just drawing out in some attempt to like meagerly defend themselves against this oncoming horde of the hungriest people that you can possibly imagine who approach holiday meals with almost self-destruction in mind.

Like I've always said, if I don't feel like a rib is almost cracked on the way out of Thanksgiving dinner, I haven't done the job well enough.

I need to be a little bit miserable.

Yeah, you want your own structural integrity to be threatened.

Yes,

we got to flush the pipes to see where the cracks are.

That's how I treat Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We've only gotten started with these vivid mental pictures.

But wait, so just to give people a picture of you now, though, now, okay, 3.15 was your peak, or so we'll call it.

What are you weighing in at now?

I probably walk around on any given day between 255 and 260 when I'm feeling my best and when I've when I've really been dialed in.

Which is incredible.

Just a matter of just the math, right?

Oh, yeah.

It's it's insane to look around and do the math for me, for my dad, for buddies of mine who I played with and to kind of see what's what's possible.

But every once in a while, like we all get caught up in trying to be the best version of ourselves.

Every once in a while, I have to be like, all right, when one of these pictures comes up, like that used to be you, and now you are much less of that.

And that's a pretty cool thing.

Well, i want to get to uh the question of identity and who we really are as we go through this story but i just want to establish sort of the the metrics here the the sort of the standards the expectations for what it means to be a lineman in the nfl an offensive lineman because right now um the average weight is in fact 315 pounds my god so that is average right um and in fact the elias sports bureau cited by uspn looked into this whole thing and found that it wasn't always this way so when we talk about about, I mean, you, again, you have relatives who played dating back to these times, but like in the 70s, the average weight of starting offensive linemen was 254 pounds.

So you kind of have lived in your own just personal journey, the reverse evolution of the offensive lineman in the NFL.

I am.

I'm a one-man walking evolution poster of girth throughout the ages.

Yes.

So 60 pounds heavier for the average O-lineman, 60 pounds lighter personally for you.

I now understand the tree you come from.

I now understand

that it's not always just genetics, though.

Sure.

Well, I think, and that's the one thing everyone kind of assumes because you're right.

You look at my lineage and you say, surely you never had a problem being big enough.

And if you look at me, you know, I'm 6'4, wide shoulders, good frame is always the way people in sports, when you're identifying young talent, you always go, oh, like he's got a good frame.

Like you're looking at a house and you're like, it's got good bones.

Yeah.

Or like when you see a puppy with big paws, you're like, oh, he's going to grow into those.

Like you see a kid with size 14 shoes and big hands, you're like, all right, we got another one there.

Let's get his hand in the dirt.

But it is, it's always interesting because, yeah, you obviously, everyone who plays this sport at a high enough level has a certain level of genetic components.

You walked out of the hospital with enough to be invited to the party, but then how long you're going to stay and how many levels you're going to go through are for a lot of guys going to be dependent on what you're willing to build on top of that.

There are certainly guys that are just big by birth, that are always going to be bigger, faster, stronger, and in the lineman community, there are plenty of those.

But then there are the rest of us kind of in that middle ground.

It's like, all right, you're pretty big, but what are you going to do to get to that next level to make yourself the weapon you need to be to play this sport?

Right.

So, just again, for people who don't know the NFL and its logic, right?

Like, you can start from like the biggest picture perspective, which is that, let's say the NFL wants offense.

So, okay, how do do you get offense?

You need quarterbacks to have time to throw.

How do you have time to throw?

You need offensive linemen to protect him and give him more time.

And how do you get more time?

Well, make those guys into the biggest walls imaginable.

Yeah, I've always said if football is violent 40 wizards chess, then offensive linemen are the girthiest pawns known to man.

And that's not to be, you know, demeaning to the position.

It's incredibly important.

And I want to emphasize when you're watching offensive linemen in the NFL, you're truly seeing some of the best, if not the best athletes overall on the field because what they're capable of doing at that size is incomprehensible.

The first strength and conditioning book I ever had was just BFS.

It was bigger, faster, stronger.

That was my high school strength and conditioning book.

And that was the idea for so long is, all right, in order to be able to do this job, you got to put on enough armor to go out there to both absorb and deliver contact because your job up front is to make sure your friends don't get hurt.

Like, that's the way I always phrase it.

It's the most accountable position and what I think is the most accountable sport in North America because you have a group of people whose only job is to make sure I am both physically capable and mentally dialed in enough to make sure that my incredibly valuable friend, the quarterback, doesn't get hurt and ruin everybody's lives in the process.

So there's a physical price to pay for everything that goes on, but it starts with your physical ability to get that job done.

And we just don't think enough about the pawns.

Like what are the, what are the girthies, pawns thinking?

And one of the things that I am thinking as I hear you say,

you use the terminology of the NFL as being invited to the party.

Yeah.

Whether being a lineman who has to put on weight, right?

Whether that's actually a party, because from afar, it's like, wait a minute, you guys just eat whatever you want.

Again,

I just imagine, you know, there's a Homer-Simpsonian aspect to just like

stuffing your face perpetually.

But tell me what it's actually like.

What kind of a party is it really?

I walked onto Notre Dame's campus at probably 275 pounds, and I knew that wasn't going to be enough.

And so, eating, in addition to all the working out you do, all the time on the field, becomes a part of the job description.

I used to call like lunch and dinner.

Those were business meetings.

It was me and the food at a business meeting.

And we couldn't leave until the job was done.

I had to be clean play club on every meal.

And you learn all of these tricks on how to do it.

We started off a lot more rudimentary when I got to college.

Like the party when I first got there didn't have as much of the nutritional insight as we see in the world of sports now, where sports science has become a part of this process at a level we never could have seen in 2008, 2009, 2010.

But back then was, hey, I wanted to gain weight.

So my freshman year dorm room, and I remember I roomed with another athlete.

I roomed with a guy in the lacrosse team there who slept across from me who would always laugh because you looked over and on the wall taped to my bed was a calendar that had my eating schedule on it, times when I was supposed to eat, what I was supposed to eat at those meals.

And then underneath my bed was the tub of weight gainer that you would see at like a GNC or any of those stores, a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.

Because when all else fails and you got to get calories in late at night or early in the morning before you go and do anything else, there ain't nothing that's going to hit like a triple deck or PB sandwich.

And like people have the peanut butter and jelly conversation.

I really grew to love peanut butter sandwiches because it was just a means to an end at that point.

It was your trying to get to the right number at the end of your day to be in a positive, you know, caloric intake.

It's an organizational

discipline.

It's an ambition that turns the space under your bed into, yeah,

there's almost like

an apocalypse bunker aspect to this.

Like you're eating as if the world will end.

You're eating as if, yes, your survival in this world depends on that.

Because to some extent it does.

Like if you're trying to get on the field, if you're trying to impress relative to your other peers in that position, once you're there, if you're trying to do the job itself, like my last year at Notre Dame, we were undefeated.

We ended up playing Alabama in the national title game.

I was a starter for the first time day one for the entire season.

And I remember my offensive line coach coming to me in the middle of October towards November.

And my weight had dipped down.

I was like 285 on a good day at that point.

And he's like, we need you to get that back up.

You're quite literally not, you don't carry enough mass right now to do the job we're going to need in November and beyond that.

One of the things we did that I wanted you to do was assign you to go and reminisce with some of your colleagues.

What was it like in the NFL as per your reporting?

So the NFL is an even more disciplined high-stakes version of that because now obviously it's changed in college, but in the NFL, there's a lot of money riding on all this stuff.

There is the certainly the money for the franchise, the hopes and dreams for everybody there required by that, but but also for you, the personal gain once you get to that level that's now attainable for guys.

It's a winning lottery ticket if you play your cards right.

And so for a lot of guys, both that incentive of it, but also just self-preservation day to day for the same things I mentioned.

You're going out there and doing battle with, I mean, defensive linemen in the NFL are some of the biggest physical freaks planet Earth has to offer.

Horrifying.

And as an offensive lineman, your job is to go backwards and do a bunch of very unnatural things skill set wise to try and stop them.

And so you've got got to be pretty big and strong and capable to do that but you also then have to maintain the speed along the way and so that's where some of the advancements in the way you go about putting that weight on started to become so important so for people who aren't watching the nfl every sunday uh gojo who are the people at top your metal stand of beef like just like the the the the dudes who you even you marvel at and say that that is a big boy oh yeah i i always say it's that nothing this big should move this this well, brand of offensive linemen.

Guys like Mike McGlinchy, who plays for the Denver Broncos now, who was after me at Notre Dame, who's like 6'8, 325, 330 pounds.

Daniel Fauley, the former Minnesota tackle who now plays for the Baltimore Ravens, who is listed at 6'8, 379.

Dewan Jones, 6'8, 379, listed here according to 375, excuse me, on his Wikipedia page.

Just these effortlessly large mountains of man so I should say as somebody who weighs approximately 165 and wears it well and you know it's well my cholesterol levels may disagree inside it's it's it's it's rough

but I want to get to the sense of you're like cramming peanut butter sandwiches late at night

this sounds kind of miserable on some level to me.

And I just want to know how much fun it actually was.

Like when did it when did it really start feeling like work?

Not just for you, but for people who go on to do this for years and years in the NFL?

Yeah,

I think

as you get a little bit older, like you first get to college and it's like anything else, excess is fun.

But after a while, you start to kind of feel the cumulative effects of it on your body.

You know, the jar of tums in a football locker room is hallowed ground.

It's something that everybody knows the location of because that's kind of the battle you're constantly fighting.

You know, I got to talk to Joe Thomas for this, who, you know, accomplished the highest goals that you could want to as an offensive lineman.

All right.

I think we're ready to roll here.

I'll count us in and we'll get rocking and rolling, Joe.

Appreciate it, man.

Cool.

Yeah, of course.

No problem.

He's the pinnacle.

He's what most people think is one of the consensus best players of all time.

And for him, the journey of...

All right, when is big too big?

When do I need to dial it back?

What are the things where all of a sudden, the way I'm getting to this point to do the job starts to become a negative for the job in a way that I have to address.

Once I got to about 320, 325, that's kind of where I felt like I was sort of topped out.

And it was not only the speed issue, but it was limberness.

Like when you got this huge tire around your waist, it becomes a little bit harder to get down to the positions that you want to.

When I was playing, Prilosec sponsored the New York Giants' offensive line after they won the Super Bowl.

And I was so upset about it because I was like, if anybody needs Prilosec, it's me.

I'm taking this stuff like it's candy.

Like I'm eating it after Halloween, like a 12-year-old kid, because I had a

stomach acid in my throat from heartburn like 24-7.

I just thought it was normal.

All I knew is that I had to feel stuffed, like I just pushed myself away from the Thanksgiving table at all times.

And it actually gave me stress if there was any times where I didn't have that feeling because I knew if I wasn't overly full and if I wasn't bloated, that I was going to be losing weight and that my coach was going to have my ass the next time we weighed in, probably next on Monday.

Describe what just the regimen would be for Joe.

And I guess what I'm curious about too is not simply, okay,

like what is breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but also like, what are the unseen consequences of your breakfasts and your lunches and your dinners being this extreme?

Well, I mean, you have like the very like funny base level stuff of like, you're just sweaty all the time.

You know, you're constantly having to shop at a very different section of the clothing store.

I have a vivid memory of walking into an urban outfitters, looking up at one of the store employees, him seeing me and just immediately shaking his head no and going back to folding clothes.

You've got that, but like, you know, your joints start to feel the effect of that after a while.

The heartburn that most guys carry usually borders on acid reflux is something that some guys end up, you know, diagnosibly so dealing with.

And just the cumulative effect of all of the blows and physical contact you're taking as a player then adding up because when you're done going out there and doing the job, you're still carrying around that armor that you've put on this entire time.

And in some cases, more than your body naturally wants to carry.

That makes me

concerned, Mike.

Like the idea of maybe

people were not meant to be this big.

Yeah, there's, I think definitely a reality to that for some guys.

And

I think like anything else, it's kind of the cost-benefit analysis that each of us can do.

You know, if you've got the opportunity to go and do this for me, you know, I got my college education paid for.

I got to go and have these experiences playing a game that I loved, you know, trying to

mimic a man I revered and my dad and do all these things, live out so many dreams and had the opportunity to try it at the NFL level.

That didn't work out.

But for a lot of guys, they can change their lives and their families' lives forever by going out here and saying, all right, in the short term, this is going to be potentially uncomfortable.

I'm not going to feel great.

I'm going to withstand all of the physical damage that the sport comes.

And then I'm going to also deal with some of the discomfort in those other areas physically, joint-wise, all the inflammation, all the acid reflux that we talked about, knowing that my end goal is something that feels worth it when most guys do the math out.

Yeah, I do worry also about what your roommate's experience was.

Let me tell you what.

The smells.

The smells of the things that go in, because you learn along the way as an offensive lineman there are a lot of tricks if you're a guy that's trying to gain weight explain like something that joe and i talked about was

heavy whipping cream we would drink these uh basically milk fat malt shakes that were like 10 ounces and they were a thousand calories and basically all it was was milk fat and they added like chocolate malt powder and like some extra sugar in there uh so there was like a free thousand calories that you just shoot like a shot in the bar after your workouts And then, of course, you know, you're eating cheese curds and you're eating burgers and pizza late night and Qdoba and Chipotle and drinking plenty of beers.

So there's a lot of calories going in your system.

What that turns your body into is essentially just a mass production machine for sulfur.

So imagine a whole apartment that smells like sulfur on a good day just because of what's coming out of your body.

Yeah, so sulfur, if in case you're not familiar with the smell, is like it's

rotting eggs-ish.

Yeah, the worst smelling farts on planet planet Earth.

Like let's let's let's just lay it all on the table.

I believe it's what people once referred to as brimstone.

Yes.

It was there was no fire, but plenty of brimstone in our apartment.

So we would come back and we would have like these big, we call it the all-American breakfast, come back high-protein breakfast, bacon, eggs, heavy whipping cream and shakes to finish it off, all that stuff.

And then when we would get done, you would sit around for a couple hours, the digestive process would do its thing, and all of a sudden, whether it was noises or, you know, the silent varietal, which, as we know, is always infinitely more dangerous.

Right, right.

I am imagining like a magic school bus episode where someone goes inside of Mike Golick's body at Notre Dame and Miss Frizzle.

That's like a horror, that's a horror movie.

That's like the Willy Wonka tunnel,

but full of like dessert remnants and at that point, a fair amount of booze.

Yeah, and so the club of people who

who enjoyed, or at the very least,

ate a lot of

the whipping cream stuff.

You and Joe Thomas.

What was your reaction when you saw him looking like this?

Turn around.

Let's see the front.

Look at this.

Look at this.

Wow, you are lying.

That is abs, at his shoulders, at his arms, that is everything.

Tracks.

That looks like a competitive bodybuilder.

That is amazing.

So for people who, again, aren't watching on YouTube at the Japanese Network, that was TMZ

reveling in how unbelievably hot Joe Thomas is now.

There are a lot of us that lose weight.

That is also a reminder that Joe Thomas is in, they talk about the Hall of Fame, like there's the Hall of Fame and then there's the inner room of the Hall of Fame.

Joe is inside the inner room, even in another room for the exclusive high-end, accomplished fat guys of all time, that they are some of the greatest athletes on earth.

And when you just strip away a little bit of that outer layer, that's what's underneath one of the greatest left tackles to ever play football.

But the reason I even had the idea to talk about all of this, to see under the hood of all of this, to see under the bed of all of this, is because

I keep on seeing stories that are like Joe Thomas.

It's remarkable, Mike, how often people in your cohort, your colleagues who played along the offensive line, show up looking like they are, you know, they are participants in a talk show makeover program.

For so many guys, there is that feeling as you get closer to the finish line of your career, whenever it is, of, okay, I've been big for a long time.

And in the case of me and the group of linemen that had to work to get there, I had to make that an active decision every day.

I had to wake up with gaining weight on my mind.

It had to be a conscious effort 365 days a year, or I wasn't going to be able to do it.

And there's a relief on the other side when all of a sudden you don't have to live like that anymore.

And then the thought crosses your mind of, oh my God, like maybe some of these things that I've normalized for so long about how my body feels, how it looks, and the things associated with that, that.

Now that gets to change.

Now I do get to shop at Lululemon and buy stuff off the rack.

Now I might not look at a flight of stairs and just look fondly over at the elevator to take to the second floor anymore.

Like all of these things can potentially change, and there is a little bit of relief at the end.

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well i come to you for the secrets of how to do this stuff how to transform your body because we live i mean this past year 2023 has been the year of weight loss drugs ozempic we go we've talked about this some on the show People are looking for a scientific solution to a problem that now seems to be understood more scientifically.

But the offensive linemen of the NFL who show up

as part of this

reinvented tribe of retired fat guys who are no longer that big.

Why?

What is the through line here?

Why can you people

do this so effectively?

I always thought of it as a hammer and a chisel, meaning you do a little bit of work every day over time and you can make something great.

And what that requires is discipline and comfort with monotony.

It's all of the things that make you an offensive lineman that are inherent to the psyche of the position.

Is again, you go backwards and you do the most unnatural skill set in the sport and try and block the best athletes on the planet.

And so to do that, you rep the same things over and over again every day.

And none of them are fun.

None of them are cute.

It's not like the stuff that you see DBs and wide receivers putting on Instagram in the offseason.

There's no O-line version of that that sells.

There's just the work.

There's just quite literally putting your hand in the dirt.

And this is what Joe Thomas had to say about that.

Typically, linemen, you see a lot of those guys, they go one way or the other, right?

If they're huge guys and they had to lose weight to play on the offensive line, which does happen, like they kind of migrate that way, right?

Because that's just their genetics, right?

But a lot of guys, they end up do losing a lot of weight.

You mentioned Russell Oku, myself.

Nick Hardwig is another guy that I think about.

Alan Fanneca ran marathons when he retired.

But that's because offensive linemen are used to being in the weight room.

We're used to watching what we paying attention to the food reading, whether it be guys like me who are trying to gain that weight.

So understanding how that food handled in your body, how your body treated the signals, the medicine that you were giving it.

We love to work out.

Like that was like the brotherhood that we formed in the weight room.

And so it was easy for us to transition.

Maybe it was different workouts than when you were playing, but still it was, it was part of your routine.

It was part of something that you love to do.

Whereas I never met a skill guy that liked to be in the weight room.

I never met a DB that you didn't have to chase his ass in the locker room to get in there and to work out because those guys hated it.

And they never watched what they eat because it didn't matter, right?

These guys are running seven to nine miles of sprints every day in practice.

That's outrageous.

Like no wonder they have torn hamstrings all the time.

This part of the mentality, the idea that if you understand the offensive lineman as somebody who made himself into this, who had to be disciplined in his eating, in his diet, in his scheduling,

in the construction and renovation of his body, you're saying that you called upon, that offensive linemen in retirement call upon the same wiring that they had sort of honed and perfected as a player to now do the exact opposite in terms of summoning the discipline.

100%.

It's the same level of discipline and really a lot of the same tools that you understand about diet and the way that your body responds to things.

That was one of the fascinating parts of talking to Nick Hardwick.

Okay, so you should know that Nick Hardwick is a legendary figure in this world.

He played 11 years at center with the San Diego Chargers.

He was a pro bowler in 2006.

He was playing at around 300 pounds, listed at 305, I believe, thereabouts.

And then he retired in 2014.

And pretty promptly, he lost 85 pounds in four months.

It was something he was so good at, the losing of all of this weight.

that Nick Hardwick then decided to devote his entire life to it.

He's become someone who trains others, who helps them lose weight.

I tell all of my clients when they're getting in, I said, weight loss is a math equation with a lifestyle problem.

So we, it's our job to figure out

what we can do with our lifestyle and what you're willing and able to do to fit that into the math equation because we have to make the numbers work out.

When I started losing weight, I ate at the same times of day.

Like your body, you eat every two, two and a half hours.

You eat when the clock says, not when you're hungry, not when anything else matters like that.

You've got a certain breakdown of things that you want on your plate nutritionally.

But for me, it was, all right, the number when I was training to get ready for my pro day was 5,500 to 6,000 calories a day.

And so now I just took that number and I cut it in half.

And it's comfortable at first because you are eating until you feel sick more often than not when that's the case.

And so now on the other side, it's taking that same process and the level at which you're working out.

You're still used to being in the weight room, throwing around weight.

You're used to doing the things that, again, the vast majority of the population has never been asked to do physically, to push themselves that hard for that long.

So, all these guys that are wired like that just take that system that's already built into them and then they take it and just assign different number values to it.

Yeah, I am

laughing at how little we appreciate the amount of weight room time that you guys put in while also being like, you know, the pudgy joke of like, you know, oh, you're a human, you're a, you're a human wall, you're a girthy pawn.

Yeah, and that's, and that's why videos like what you saw there with Joe Thomas or seeing Nick Hardwick now, who's another guy, like an offensive lineman that walks around with abs, that's what's underneath so many of these guys.

Like you don't get to the point where you're squatting like some of these guys, 500 and 600 pounds and benching 400 to 500 pounds.

You've got a ton of muscle under there.

You just need a little bit of cushion on top to be able to go out there and take the pounding and do that over time.

And when you chip that away, I always said cutting open an offensive lineman, like if you were to cut the yoke up here on the shoulders, to me, it's the part that former athletes.

Y-O-K-E in this case.

Yes, yes, the Y-O-K-E there, not the Y-O-L-K that you were eating a lot of during that time that leads to the, I won't spell out cholesterol problems right now, but you get the brimstone.

Yes, the brimstone in there.

But yeah, if you cut into a yoke, seeing an offensive lineman, it's like the rings in a tree.

You can see the years where they put on the most weight and kind of go back and diagram their entire existence.

When you talk to Nick Hardwick, who is

now a guru of sorts, he seems to specialize, right, in training

O-linemen to lose weight as a specialty.

Well, he specialized in training people to lose weight the same way an O-lineman does, those same principles that we talk about.

So he tried to transcribe all that stuff to help people who never got to live what he did, who never had the resources that he did for how they can still replicate that process in their life.

But it's also, you know, the identity shift that comes with that, too.

Going from football player

to civilian and trying to find my purpose, trying to find a new identity, trying to find what's going to get me out of bed in the morning and just stoke my fire like football did.

To be honest, I think that identity piece is what most football players struggle with when they get out.

It's finding who they are.

What was that like for Nick?

It was a really

emotional process for Nick, and he was really candid when we talked to him.

One, about his shift back to being a much smaller body, which is part of it, but it's also kind of a proxy for you're saying goodbye to this old version of yourself.

And for so many guys, and for Nick in particular, it was the classic case of how an athlete grapples with losing the part of them that's defined their life for so long.

And Nick was very candid about the dark places that that took him to when we talked to him.

what i realized two months into my retirement was i was miserable and i actually like told my wife i said i came inside crying it was a saturday morning

and i said baby i'm i uh i don't know what's going on with me and i'm going to give you all of our money except a million dollars and i'm going to go to nicaragua And I had no idea what I was saying at the time.

And I don't know why I chose Nicaragua.

I'd never been to Nicaragua, but essentially it was my way of saying, I'm going to leave you with everything, and then I'm going to go to Nicaragua and kill myself.

I had everything in my life straight, right?

I had made a ton of money.

I had saved all of my money.

I had two beautiful boys that were three and one.

I had a wife who cared for me regardless of what sport I played.

I had a career going.

I had everything you could ever want.

And here I am saying I'm going to kill myself.

Right.

So

what I realized after

years

was that I was heartbroken.

I had never been heartbroken before.

I had never had my heart ripped out of my chest and just put on the curb and stopped.

And that's what that feeling was: that I had lost my teammates.

I wasn't really allowed to hang out with my best friends all day, every day anymore.

You know, I lost my purpose in the community, my identity.

I lost all those things.

So I realized that identity is just such a massive component to physical health.

It's a massive component to mental health.

And I don't really know if you can separate those two the way that people like to separate them.

I think they go hand in hand.

I had never heard Nick talk in so stark terms like that about his own search for identity.

Yeah.

How did he go about trying to find it?

The things that he missed that you heard him talk about there was he had a community of people that needed him and that he needed, right?

You rely on each other for everything.

The level of trust that you've got with your teammates is really hard to replicate elsewhere.

And he had a goal.

He had a purpose and he talked about that a lot every day.

And what we realized with now the community that he's built is that he's found a lot of those same things in this next version of himself because he's created this community of people that he's got a purpose to them.

They need him and he needs them to help in the weight loss journey for these people who are trying to transform themselves.

He's built a community out of people who are trying to change their bodies for the better with that purpose of living healthy lives now, of being the best version of themselves, of what it allows them in terms of being the best, you know, spouse or partner or whatever they're trying to do outside of that.

And we realize that it's a lot of the same core things in there.

A community of people trying to change themselves for a select purpose that they can all help each other with along the way.

It had a lot of the same tenets of his life as a football player, now as the leader of a different community.

I don't think it's surprising that he would share such a thing with with you as a member of this tribe as well.

How much pride do you take when you see these stories of transformation that seemingly annually come up now with O-linemen who have, yeah, found a new version of themselves that they seem really happy about?

Yeah, I think it's pride on a number of levels.

It sort of is a sigh of relief because you do worry about what everyone's going to do with that next step of your life.

You live so much of your life, not as a football player, not as an offensive lineman.

So there's that.

And then there's obviously the health component of it too.

You know, long-term being that big is not sustainable.

It's not good for everything inside you.

You can feel that.

So knowing that guys are also setting themselves up to be here longer after the fact, because we see far too many guys that you lose early for any number of reasons.

You know, for me, very personally, like I look at my dad who different position, different mindset, a lot of those things, but my dad was a 300-pound defensive lineman in the NFL for nine years.

When he finished, he ballooned up to like 320 pounds and dealt with type 2 diabetes that was exacerbated by that.

Well, Mike, your dad, I grew up watching him.

Yeah.

And his character,

his sense of self was a guy who would literally be like stuffing donuts into his mouth.

And it was amazing.

Come on.

Come on, everyone in here.

Cheers, cheer, fall, not your damn.

Come on up.

Wake up the echoes.

That's right.

You get a fight song.

He's got three left.

He's got two left after that.

It was one of the best bits Mike and Mike had was my dad shoving multiple donuts in his mouth, reading a sentence, and then opening up the caller line to see if people could guess what he was saying to win a prize.

And again, very lucrative, like all these things.

And it was who he was to an extent, but he had to learn, like everybody else, all right.

How much of that me can I take with me?

How do I balance that with a me that also wants to make sure that

I'm around here longer, I'm healthier, and I'm all these things.

And so watching my dad go through that and now get down, my dad is probably 230 pounds at this point.

Man.

And knowing what it's done for him health-wise, and just from someone who wants their dad around as long as possible and who for the rest of these guys who lose weight want to know that they're going to be able to give themselves the best chance possible to be there with their families.

families and live the life beyond playing that they want, there is something that you're very proud to see this for for everybody.

Yeah.

And just the idea of

I thought of myself as something because I was incentivized to do it, because I was pressured, because I was taught, because I wanted it, right?

I don't want to take away agency from any of the people in the story, right?

But the idea that now I'm going to be something that is trying to be the opposite.

And that,

how do you reconcile who you really are when you're sort of caught between two extremes in a sense?

Yeah, that was also really interesting talking to Nick and to Joe about was

I always say like the Pope speaks so many languages.

And I always want to know for people that are multilingual, what language do you dream in?

Because that feels like the one that's most who you are at your core.

And so when you're in a reform,

when you're an offensive lineman, you know, how do you see yourself?

Who is the real you?

This version of me is who I was as a kid.

It's who I was until I was 18.

And it was really only not me when it was manufactured, right?

When I was doing those things as far as, you know, chugging the milk fat with malted chocolate syrup in it and eating crazy pizzas and ice cream before bed like that me that was huge fat joe as my kids call me i never really fully identified with that guy because i always just looked in the mirror and i thought of myself i dreamed as a normal size 6'6 you know former professional athlete i guess if there is such a thing I think it's like anything else.

As you grow older, you learn which pieces you can take with you and you learn how to make sure they best serve the person you want to be going forward.

We all want to grow and change.

You've just quite literally gotten to do it for so much of your life that now you get to figure that out both from a physical standpoint, you know, what are the things I like to do workout wise?

How do I, when do I feel like my best?

Like I went through a stretch last year where for six months I was like, I need to move weight again.

And so I went back and started lifting free weights because I wanted to feel a little bit strong again.

I needed a taste of that because mentally that put me in a place where I felt like my best self a little bit.

So you figure out things like that that work for you physically as you go along that also hopefully give you the the best mental byproduct possible as you try and grapple with all these other things that are more higher level existential conversations we have about athletes taking that next step.

This is where I also established that part of your bona fides on this topic are that I saw you recently tweet about cookie dip.

Oh man, let me tell you, dipping cookies into just mashed up version of more cookies

was actually absolutely the fattest I've like even like people in my life and I am my father's son.

I have also made part of of the living.

I'm the Duke's Mayo Bowl guy.

Cream-filled cookies here.

You first take a dip.

It's a really interesting blend of flavors.

Thumbs up for me.

A pioneer of gluttony on the grandest stages.

The language you dream in when you're asleep is cookies.

100%.

With some donuts and heavy whip and cream mixed in there as well.

Well, that's the thing at the end here that I'm laughing about I am so glad that you and your dad and all of these guys have found like sustainable,

seemingly sustainable personal transformations that I think go well beyond just simply losing the weight, but it's about the discipline and the commitment to change and become a better version of yourself.

And now you are stuck with the catch-22 of like, oh, wow, my dad is going to be around and he's

really

objectively hotter than me.

The Zaddy phenomenon was not something I was ready for.

Like my colleagues openly thirsting for my 60-year-old father as he has shed weight and gained facial hair.

He looks so good.

And again, it's great, but it also has turned around now.

And every day where I feel like, oh, maybe I won't go work out today, I'm like, are you really going to let your dad be hotter than you for this much longer?

There's a photo of him where he was doing a

panel discussion.

Yeah, it was with Sugat in New York.

Yes.

The photo of your dad, it looked like he was like working on a vineyard, like tanned, like a curlicue in his hair, just like oily in the best ways.

Oh, yeah.

He's slightly bronzed.

He's looking at the tannins and the glass and the sunlight as they glisten there.

Grapes behind him in the distance.

Yeah, no,

he has transformed into his own sports talk version of the most interesting man in the world now with this wonderful salt and pepper look.

So he has got both the hair that is both full, rich, dense, and now packed with grays, and the body that is slim enough to fit in European cut clothing.

Yeah, God.

I didn't have the story of the Golig family ending for now with European cut clothing, but

you guys are a remarkable species.

It's truly aspirational.

I grew up certainly trying to be like my dad in a number of ways as a football player and as a man.

I never thought that in my mid-30s, I would have to try and emulate his body type in order to become more appealing to potential partners here.

That wasn't a card I had in the bingo card.

I am so glad, though, it is the card you have played for me today.

Mike Gullick Jr.,

thank you for doing this, man.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, Pablo.

Okay, Okay, so as I hover over my keyboard here at the dawn of 2024, I am finding out something very important already.

In the same way that Pablo Torrey finds out is not really a show about sports.

Sorry to break it to you.

Today's episode isn't really a show about weight loss.

I mean, it's technically that, obviously.

But at the beginning of the new year, I do find myself contemplating some sincere form of lasting personal change.

And I just want to acknowledge here that it can be really hard to change who we are.

Really hard.

I mean, listen to Nick Hardwick on this as he was explaining to Mike Golick Jr.: It's a question of our most fundamental identity sometimes.

It can be so hard to change ourselves.

But I guess the point of today's episode is just to remind us

that we really can.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark Media Production.

Thank you for kicking off your new year with us,

and I'll talk to you soon.