Bryson DeChambeau looks a lot thinner these days than compared to when most golf fans might have seen him last on the PGA Tour.
The 2020 US Open champion from Winged Foot now plays on LIV Golf, and he's been going through some struggles to find a game -- and, frankly, a body type -- that will allow him to be successful after chasing mass and speed at the start of the decade. He has also battled a hand injury that has kept him from playing well.
In the last few months, however, DeChambeau seems to have found a diet and a physique that he likes, and the results are starting to manifest themselves on the golf course.
DeChambeau leads the 2023 PGA Championship at Oak Hill through the morning wave of Round 1, shooting a 4-under 66 that was best in that half of the draw.
After the round, DeChambeau went into detail about his weight loss and how he dropped a rather stunning 18 pounds in just 24 days. How did he do it? By slashing the number of calories he was consuming in a day.
"Well, a lot of diet changes and eating a lot going down to 5,000 calories down to 2,900, whatever it is now," DeChambeau said after the round.
"Carrie, my chef, she helps me out with that. But eating properly instead of eating stuff that inflames my body. I took a Zoomer peptide test, which essentially tells what you inflames your blood when you eat it. I was allergic to corn, wheat, gluten, dairy. Pretty much everything I liked, I couldn't eat. I took that out. Started taking it out in August and over the course of time, I've lost all this inflammation, lost a lot of fat and slimmed down like crazy. I lost 18 pounds in 24 days. It was crazy. It wasn't fat. It was all water weight. You know how I looked before. I was not skinny."
DeChambeau certainly still looks more muscular than the scrawny kid who came out of SMU to the PGA Tour, but now he feels in a better place physically and can still hit the ball with a lot of speed.
"The fast twitch stuff [that translates to ball speed and distance] is still there," he said. "I built that, ingrained that in. Long drive is more fast twitch than anything. Yeah, you have to build a muscle system that can support it. You see a lot of guys that are just lanky and they just hit it really far. It's because they are fast twitch. You can train it. It's not easy to train. It hurts, but you can do it."
