Big Ben Reportedly "Obsessed" With Diet In Year 18 Is Perfectly Big Ben

From Pro Football Talk:

"As Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger approaches what likely will be the last year of his career, he’s using a different approach.

Roethlisberger is focusing more than ever on his health and fitness.

“Ben camp says biggest concern is weight loss,” Ryan Burr reported on Twitter. “He has been so driven since [the] season ended. Source says his diet is stricter than [Tom] Brady.” (Maybe it’s as strict. It’s harder to imagine it being even stricter than the TB12 method.)

Roethlisberger’s camp also says he’s in the “best shape of his life” (99 percent of the players in the league will say that in mid-July), and that Roethlisberger “hears everything.”

Hey, better late than never, right?

You know its July with only a few weeks remaining until training camp every year when two things happen: 1. QB rankings start making their rounds and 2. Some sort of story about Roethlisberger's fitness comes out. 

Last year it was Jay Glazer making the claim that Ben, to the apparent surprise of everyone, doesn't care about his fitness and his idea of an offseason workout program is doing yoga once then drinking beer on the golf course. Now this July it's this. It reminds me of the high school days when the moratorium week would be happening and we'd have time off. Should we have done workouts before we headed back for two-a-days (two weeks of two practices a day in late July for those of you reading born after 2000)? Yes. Would we? The only workout we'd do is similar to Glazer's claim last year and that was elbows up. 

Then maybe on the Friday-Saturday before the break was over we'd go for a brutal mile long battle of run/jog/stop and put your hands on your knees then go into Sunday saying "ahh yeah that should do" before the work began again on Monday. And what's even funnier is that even with this "report" coming out we all know that Big Ben will show up to training camp and the first media day availability still looking like he has for the past 15 years - like he just ate two meatball subs. 

Now, that's going to seem like a dig, but I swear it's not. It's just who he is. Part of his physique. Part of his lore damn near now. It's simple. He's not Little Ben. Never has been. Never will be. I appreciate the effort here, 7, to hopefully try to take some weight off those joints so you can survive through December one last time, but at the end of the day, ya just gotta embrace that you're just one big-boned motherfucker.