When you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight. That’s not exactly breaking news.
But for former Chargers center Nick Hardwick, it’s been hard to get people to understand. Hardwick lost 85 pounds in less than five months after he retired last year, and he’s been subjected to all sorts of questions about whether that radical weight loss is a sign of something nefarious. In reality, Hardwick told Emily Kaplan of TheMMQB.com, it’s been a simple matter of eating less while continuing to put himself through vigorous cardiovascular exercise in retirement.
“You want the secret? It’s ultimately this,” Hardwick said. “Reduce your calories to less than what you burn. Are you disciplined enough to go through this day in and day out?”
Hardwick said it was always difficult for him to maintain the 300-plus pound weight required of an NFL offensive lineman, and so it was actually a relief not to have to constantly eat to keep that weight up. If you’re eating several thousand calories a day to maintain a bodyweight over 300 pounds, and then you shift down to a standard 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, you’re going to lose weight rapidly. That’s not difficult to understand.
At least, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand. But for some, it’s extremely difficult to understand. Tony Kornheiser of ESPN, in particular, said on television that he suspected Hardwick of using performance-enhancing drugs.
“That hurt,” Hardwick said. “I knew what I went through to get to that point. It wasn’t like I was 300 pounds of muscle before. I had fat on me. Not to mention, I got tested quite frequently. I don’t even know how it’s possible for guys to use steroids in the NFL today.”
Unfair, baseless accusations of PED use make for better TV than simple facts like this: If you eat less, you lose weight. And if you eat a lot less, you lose a lot of weight. That’s what Hardwick has done. He deserves credit, not scorn.
