LAKE FOREST, Ill. – Thomas Brown felt the need to lose some weight during this season but had a tough time taking and keeping it off.

He was 225 pounds following Week 10, when he got promoted to offensive coordinator after Shane Waldron’s firing. Fast forward three-plus weeks, during which Matt Eberflus got let go and he got elevated to interim head coach.

Now he’s at 203.

The significant drop isn’t due to stress. Brown doesn’t feel pressure in that way. He does have a lot more on his plate – pun definitely intended – which leaves less time for snacking.

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“What I realized is if you increase tasks to your day, you forget about food,” Brown said on Monday. “I went a couple days and just really didn’t eat. Didn’t really think about it. Wasn’t hungry. I was thinking about the next moment, what to say to this player, doing game planning and I look up and I’m almost 30 pounds down. So, we’ll keep going, see how long it lasts.”

That last sentence is exactly how Brown is viewing this opportunity as interim head coach. He won’t spend much time worrying about future employment or earning a more permanent title. He’s grounded in this moment, trying to maximize time and efficiency for his coaches and players while putting a quality, competitive product on the field.

“I kind of have my own thought process of it,” Brown said. “I’ve always had the thought process every job I’ve had try to excel at a high level. What I realized about this profession is if you are bad at your job, they move on from you. If you’re good at your job, they give you an opportunity to stay around. If you’re great at your job, you get elevated. So, my thought process was always to be the best I can be, not make it about myself and let the chips fall where they may.”

Brown will be strongly considered for the full-time gig in 2025, but there will be outside candidates with excellent resumes stacking up against him. That’s not in his purview right now.

His first act as interim head coach was to reach out individually to everyone on the team on Friday and Saturday to tell them how he’ll captain the ship and what the Bears can do down the stretch.

Then he started making subtle changes that players have been receptive to. He’s running efficient-as-heck meetings. He’s going without downtime between morning walk-through and afternoon practice. He’s having substitutions and unit changes sprint onto the field during practice as if it’s a game situation. It’s little things like that put Brown’s fingerprint on proceedings.

Left guard Teven Jenkins said he could sense a heightened level of attentiveness in meetings, that players were glued to their coach and locked in. Brown felt that, too, all positive signs for the team’s new leader.

While Brown’s standards are high for each practice rep and meeting moment spent preparing for the next game, he isn’t striving for A-pluses across the board.

“I don’t really care about them being perfect,” Brown said. “I want them to be excellent. I can nitpick at every single play and tell a guy how he wasn’t perfect. And, so, perfection’s not the goal. It’s to excel at your craft, use your talent, combine your skills and play for each other.”

Players have responded well to Brown, in their quest to turn things around and snap a six-game losing streak.

“I feel like he has done a good job coming in, setting the tone of what he wants to get done, and we want to win,” Jenkins said. “We know what has happened this year. We’re sick of losing and we’re frustrated. We know that we have to go out there and execute and prove why we deserve to win and show up late in games to make those plays and get over the hump.”

While the difficulties of an NFL season can weigh a team down, Brown has brought a breath of fresh air to Bears proceedings as the team tries to navigate the end of a disappointing season.

“It’s a privilege to be here, so I want us to maximize it every single day in the building,” Brown said. “And when we have an opportunity to excel on game day, go cut it loose, man. Play with no fear.”