As the great philosopher said, bull hookie.
At best doing it right -- whatever that means given that you poll 1000 trainers and you get 1000 different answers -- makes it a little easier, might increase your results by 25% or something. Shocking as it may seem to a modern trainer, people have been successfully engaging in diets for thousands of years before anybody ever wrote the first book on whatever their version of the truth was. There was probably some caveman who dropped 25 lbs to impress a cavegirl by cutting back on his portions of wooly mammoth. When I decided my football days were over and wanted to move on to tennis I once lost 50 lbs on two bowls of cereal a day and a reasonable dinner combined with 2-3 hours of exercise a day. Took me a little over 4 months. I got to the lowest body fat of my life on a Whopper jr., canned green beans, baked potatoes, and hot chocolate diet, combined with an hour of weights and 2-3 hours of basketball every night (I miss the leisure of college). For a girl of course. Every once in a while I would treat myself to these delcicious little carrot cake squares made by a local company back there, and sucked on some hard chocolate candies that alas gave me cavities to satisfy my chocolate addiction. A housemate my senior year was a completely ripped wrestler who went on to win his weihgt class in the Mr. Penn bodybuilding contest, and during the season he would survive on basically nothing but pasta with marinara sauce dumped in cold. Were any of the above examples the absolute most efficient way to go about it? I sincerely doubt it. But they were all done, all imminently doable. Having to drop 20 lbs as a millionaire professional athlete simply does not require all this fussing and fighting. Its a simple where there's a will there's a way proposition. He can hire a chef, has all the professional trainers he could ask for, free access to a gym and state of the art weightlifiting equipment (just stay away from the exercise balls). Its 20 lbs, and he's a 20 year old professional athlete with infinite money and free time to take care of it. If he wants to lose it, its gone.
Yeah. Losing weight is one of those things where you can do it in many ways... There are of course, a range of results, effectiveness and impact on one's health. I'm sure the stuff brought up by Hammer would be one of the best and healthiest ways, but at the same time one of the hardest in terms of planning your meals and stuff like that.
Anyway, I don't think we should make a big 'fuss' out of this when we haven't even seen Cousins on the floor. I for one have enough faith in him to believe that he will take the necessary steps to make him a better player.
On a side note, does anyone else hate it when you put on or lose a bit of muscle/strength and it totally messes up your jumpshot for the first couple of times you play ball?