Redskins' Williams Talks Diet, Bison Meat

"Boy, I was ready so bad to jump on y'all," Mike Williams said to Andre Carter after yesterday's Redskins practice. "I had to calm down a little bit. I don't know, I was just ready. Boy, ya'll looked like some steak or something out there."

Williams, the right tackle, was telling Carter, the defensive end, that he was ready to crush him on the field. But the steak simile was perhaps a bad one, since steak is one of the things Williams has tried to eliminate from his diet, as his weight has free-fallen from 450 pounds to about 380. Dude lost 30 pounds since the last organized team activity a month ago; you don't do that by jumping on every piece of steak you see.

Luckily, there's a potential replacement image for any steak sightings on or off the field. Bison. The other red meat.

"It's a lot better for you," Williams told me yesterday afternoon. "I haven't had any, but I looked online for some. Supposedly every hundred grams of bison meat carries about 2.3 grams of fat. Beef is double that. So you're looking at four ounces of bison meat is probably 143 calories with 2.3 grams of fat. I really now know my facts."

I was impressed. I recommended he maybe check out the tofu aisle; "I don't think I like tofu," he said. "You know, because it's bland."

Not so, but in any case, whatever Williams is doing is working. He now says his goal is to get down to 345, his collegiate playing weight, by the start of training camp at the end of July. That would be a triple-digit drop from his high, although he said he never looked dramatically obese.

"If you saw me at 450, you'd say, 'Okay,' " Williams said. "I'm pretty much more proportional, and so I won't balloon out here with the stomach and everything. Some guy asked me, 'Can you touch your toes?' I was like, 'Yeah, I can touch my toes. Oh yeah. I can kick over your head.' "

I didn't ask him to demonstrate, but then again, I wouldn't want my head to meet his size 17 shoe on a failed head kick. His pant size was about a 50 at his peak weight, up from 46, but "I usually run my pants at 50 anyways," he explained. "Really, it's because of the legs. So it's never where I had to totally change my wardrobe because I was so big. It was just the clothes I did have weren't fitting as comfortable."

And so, a plan. More workouts. Less red meat. Less carbs. Less food in general at night. Turkey meatloaf (with carrots) instead of the cow-based stuff. His wife, Enisha, is thrilled, which doesn't mean she's on the same program. She and Derrick Dockery's wife would sometimes sneak off for fast-food burgers while their husbands were training; Williams said the linemen foiled the plot by noticing that Dockery's daughter smelled like fried onions. But it's okay; Williams never liked fast food anyhow.

It was pointed out that even President Obama grants himself a juicy hamburger every once in a while.

"If I was a little guy, I may sneak a Five Guys burger in, but I'm not," Williams said. "And I'm not president. So that's two strikes against me."