Once we were well into the NBA offseason, pictures of a leaner, more chiseled LeBron James surfaced on the Internet.
The general assumption was that James' diet, which led him to drop carbs, dairy and sugar, was taken on because he needed to lose weight as he entered the prime of his career. James, 29, saw those same stories, and he knew that wasn't the case.
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At the Cleveland Cavaliers media day, James cleared up all the rumors. "It had nothing to do with basketball," James said. "I should have wrote a letter about that, too, to stop the speculation of why I did it."
James also pointed out that this summer was not an outlier. He said he does a different diet each summer as a challenge, taking various things out of his diet to test himself.
"Every summer I challenge myself to do something else that's outside the box," James said. "I stopped eating candy last summer, just no candy for a whole summer to challenge myself to see if I can do it. I decided to do this particular diet this summer for two months. It had nothing to do with basketball, nothing at all. And once I set out a goal, I like to accomplish it."
While James did carry more weight last season than at any point of his career last year, it wasn't dead weight. James was 270-plus pounds of muscle, but questions about his weight came about when James cramped up in the San Antonio heat during the 2014 NBA Finals.
James doesn't see that as an issue. He believes that he's just as athletic as ever after 10 years in the NBA.
"I'm 29 years old and I still can fly above the rim," James said. "I don't need to lose weight to do that — not at this point in my career. The great thing I got out of it was to see how my body can transform, so, as I get older in my career, if I need to lose some weight or shed some weight, I know exactly what I can get down to. It had nothing to do with basketball, but it did make me quicker so it helps our team."