NC State's BeeJay Anya is leaner, meaner, hungry for success

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Weight loss stories have all been done before. Player makes a commitment to drop excess pounds, then works with a nutritionist/strength and conditioning coach diligently and cuts the requisite weight. The stories are always interesting in their own way, but it's almost always the same story and somewhat like a surgery to repair an injury, it almost always ends successfully.

Oh sure, that player might lament the loss of his favorite foods, but he'll say he doesn't even think about it any more and he's even grown to like grilled chicken and vegetables.

Not NC State sophomore forward BeeJay Anya.

"That's the one thing that me and the nutritionist have the hardest thing with -- there's a lot of foods I don't like that are good for me, but I won't eat them," the 6-foot 9 Anya, who has been as heavy as 349 pounds since he arrived in Raleigh last year, said. "My mom's been trying to get me to eat them since I was a baby. I just won't eat them."

Like what kinds of foods?

"Just vegetables in general," Anya, who is also trying to train himself to eat salad, said, wrinkling up his nose at the thought. "Not all of them, but most of them -- broccoli and cauliflower and all that other stuff, I couldn't do it.

"They would say, 'You've got to eat this.' I would say, 'I'm not eating it' because I just won't do it."

In the typical weight loss story, the player in question is struggling with his motivation or resisting temptation, and his teammates and coaches pick him up.

Again, Anya is not the typical weight loss story.

"Last year, whenever BeeJay would go in the refrigerator, the whole team would be like, 'BeeJay, what are you doing? Why are you eating that?'" sophomore teammate Lennard Freeman said. "BeeJay would get so mad. He'd be like, 'I'm a grown man. Don't tell me what to eat.'"

Anya is mulishly stubborn, he said, to the point where if someone told him not to do something -- even his mother, when he was a kid growing up in Maryland -- he would do it just to spite them. So his teammates' warnings went unheeded.

"I'm the kind of person where you can't talk to me a certain kind of way and they used to talk to me a certain kind of way and I didn't like it. So I would do it just because they told me not to do it," Anya said.

Junior college transfer Desmond Lee took an immediate liking to Anya, and has become a brotherly figure.

The two roomed together on road trips, and while Lee tries to be a good influence -- only taking Anya out to eat and places where he can get something healthy -- he's the first to admit he wasn't always helpful last year.

"(The staff) gets on me about eating, I need to eat more and BeeJay needs to stop. They put us together and it's like I don't eat my food so he's like 'Yo Des, I'm hungry' and I'm like 'Go ahead BeeJay, don't tell anybody'," Lee said, grinning sheepishly.

That's been Anya's struggle. His weight yo-yoed up and down for much of his final two years of high school, and he was listed at 275 as a senior. Then he reported to Raleigh in the summer of 2013 at 337 pounds, somehow. They started him with a nutritionist and strength and conditioning coach Bob Alejo right away. Somehow, he gained weight before the start of the season, exasperating his head coach Mark Gottfried.

He was able to drop about 20 pounds before the start of last season, but the weight gain-loss-gain-loss-gain roller-coaster continued, seemingly never-ending. He averaged 11.8 minutes a game and scored 2.1 points, adding 1.4 blocks and 2.1 rebounds, but he ended the season back to where he had been before it started, weight-wise.

Part of it is the stubbornness, yes. But some of it is simple human nature. He likes food. A lot. Especially fast food. Go out with friends at night, then swing by a place open 24 hours and get food? Yes, all college students do that, and Anya used to do it too. 

He admits that he still has a hard time driving on Western Boulevard in Raleigh, a road that leads into NC State's campus and is dotted with various fast food establishments.

"Western Boulevard is my nightmare," Anya said. "Everywhere you turn, there's fast food. So when I'm driving down there alone, I just look forward, blast music, just look forward, don't look left, don't look right. If I do, I'm going to turn in there and it's going to be bad."

For him, McDonald's is particularly hard to avoid. But he knows the damage he would do if he did make that turn off Western and into the McDonald's drive-thru lane.

"If I went there before, I was going to go there and get a large meal with large fries, large drink -- and maybe an ice cream sundae."

So he doesn't like vegetables, and he can't eat fast food. Other than Lee, many of his teammates don't take it easy on him either, he said. Freeman admitted that he will occasionally forget Anya is coming over and order a pizza. "Really, bro?" Anya would say, exasperated, when he walked in to the see a pizza sitting out in plain sight.

So what does he eat, then?

"A lot of grilled chicken and some more salad. I don't like salad much, but I'm trying to train myself to eat it," Anya said. "It's more about what times you eat during the day. Don't eat so late. I try to cut myself off after 7 (p.m.). It was hard at first but I've gotten a lot better at it."

Of course it was hard. Weight loss is hard, even when you have the support systems in place.

Anya is now down nearly 60 pounds from his heaviest weight, though, from 349 to 290.

It wasn't just diet, either. Anya, who didn't go home to Maryland this summer and stayed on campus to work with Alejo, did cardio as many as three times a day. He was up at 6 a.m. to work out, attend summer school classes and then get back in the gym for more running. He'd go home for a nap, wake up, eat dinner and go to sleep not long after to repeat the cycle.

He said he felt like a rat on a treadmill at times. But he also eventually came to the realization that this is what he was going to have to do.

"At the end of the day, if I wanted to come in here this year and play at 346, I easily could have done that if I wanted to," Anya said. "Last year, that wasn't how I play. That wasn't my game. In order for me to play my game, I had to get down.

"I don't want to be one of those players who people say he was so good in high school and he got to college and fizzled out. I want to be a player that, he was so good in high school, he was so good in college as well. I want to be one of the players that can help this school. NC State has been good the past few years, but they haven't been able to push it to the next level like the other schools in the Triangle have done, like North Carolina and Duke. I think this year, we'll be able to push past that."

Anya is certainly an intriguing case study. In spite of weighing essentially the same as a defensive tackle for much of last season, he was surprisingly agile. His wingspan is 7-foot-9, which equals the longest in NBA history. 

Statistician Ken Pomeroy wrote an article in April about players who statistically play heavier or lighter than they're listed: Anya was the biggest difference, listed at 325 pounds and playing like he was 215. So while it sounds silly for him to say that he could have come back and played this season as heavy as he was last year, it's not a huge stretch.

"With those long arms, he's got Avatar arms or something like that. I feel like those arms help him out, like world's longest arms in the NBA or college basketball. He could be 500 pounds and with those arms, he could block a lot of shots," Freeman said. "Playing against him every day, it helps me work on different moves because if you can score on BeeJay, then you can definitely score on other centers in the league."

The real issue, though, is that NC State is a transition team and Anya just did not have the stamina to keep up. He could play for spurts -- five minutes here, seven minutes there -- and he gave the Wolfpack some energy off the bench, but that was it. It was all that he was physically capable of doing.

Freeman said when the team played pick-up last year, Anya would stay at halfcourt on the fast break. Now, he's running right along with everyone else.

"BeeJay likes to dunk, so if he feels like he's going to get a dunk, he's going to run fast," Freeman said, laughing. "He's going to sprint down the court fast. It's funny when you see BeeJay run, though."

Anya is still a big guy, and both he and his head coach said they'd like to see him drop another 10-15 pounds. But Anya said he's been lifting a lot more and has added 10 pounds of muscle. For him, it comes down to feel more than numbers, and he's trying not to let this plateau bother him too much.

"At first, (the weight) came off really quick. Now, I've been at 290 for about two weeks now. I'm trying to get to 280 and it's not going down," Anya said. "I've put on 10 pounds of muscle in this past month, so that has a lot to do with it as well. I haven't really focused as much on the numbers as I'm focused on how I feel when I'm playing."

Throughout the hard times this off-season, Alejo reminded Anya of videos like this one from his high school days. There's Anya -- still big, still with the giant wingspan -- blocking shots like a willowy shot-blocker, and using his quick hands to tip balls out to himself for rebounds or thunderous dunks. 

Once the weight started to come off, though, he didn't need much extra motivation.

"I'm blocking shots more than I was before. Last year, I was playing at 340-something and was blocking shots left and right. Now, this year I'm at 290 -- imagine what I can do now," Anya said. "It's just going to be exciting to watch because I'm going to be able to get out on the court and run with the guards.

"I'm playing above the rim more than I was last year. It's going to be one of those times when you're going to be like, 'Wow'. Wolfpack nation is going to be really excited to see that lost weight because it's going to show out on the court, and it's going to be an exciting year."

"I knew BeeJay since when he was skinny," Freeman said, catching himself. "Well, he's not skinny, but since he was smaller. So it might be foreign to (others), but this BeeJay isn't new to me. He's back to his old self. He's back to (Team USA) 17-and-under BeeJay, what I know him playing as, and he's dominating, blocking shots and everything. So this year is going to be a good year for BeeJay."

The reward is in the result for Anya. And he feels like with his physical gifts, he can do a lot better than he did last year if he can just stay on the court. So far, so good. There's no guarantee that the weight roller-coaster won't start up again -- he's only human -- but for right now, he feels way too good to even allow himself a cheat day.

"No cheat days. I don't need a cheat day," Anya said, shaking his head emphatically. "I'll take a cheat day when I'm in my big mansion with my money and everything, laid back, retired from basketball. That's when I'll take my cheat day."