Former NFL running back Eddie Lacy used to let what people said on social media get to him. He said that’s not the case now. But that doesn’t mean Lacy has forgotten when social-media wise guys needled him about his size because that’s still happening.

“I can talk about how rainy it is right now in Milwaukee but it’s so good to be back for the first time in I don’t know how long,” Lacy said during an appearance this week on “The Matt Schneidman Show” on WRNW-FM in Milwaukee, “and I bet somebody makes a joke about me having something to eat or me go eat Chinese food. It’s just crazy. I don’t get why they do it. While I was playing, having to see it every day, it gets under your skin a lot. But pretty much all I did was run people over (on the football field). That’s the only outlet that you have.”

Lacy said he’d like to do that with his old critics in the one-on-one Oklahoma drill, a football-practice standard of toughness.

“Like seriously, I wish they could bring back – I don’t know if you remember that show back in the day (‘Pros vs. Joes’),” Lacy said. “Give me that show for six months and I want six months’ worth of people — from that era, though, when I was still playing. I want those people. And just one-on-one. Everybody gets one shot, but you can’t go low. You have to stay up.”

When Lacy was barreling through 1,000-yard seasons in his first two years with the Green Bay Packers, he was lovable. When he slogged to 758 rushing yards in 2015 and Packers coach Mike McCarthy called him out for being overweight, he became a punch line for fat jokes.

“It took until probably about two years ago,” Lacy said about learning to deal with the detractors. “At some point in time, we always say mind over matter, but I think that’s just what we say to try to trick ourselves into trying to pretend it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t until like two years ago until I truly realized it doesn’t matter. Why does it hurt me that I’m a bigger person, you’re a smaller person? I like to eat; you like to eat. What’s the difference between us at the point? Why am I taking this so hard? …

“I wish I would have thought about it back then to not be affected by it so much. It builds character at the end of the day.”

Lacy doesn’t have it in for all fans. He said when he attended the Packers’ alumni weekend, the ovation he received at Lambeau Field during his introduction at halftime of the Sept. 15 game against the Indianapolis Colts made his knees shake.

“Minus the weather, it’s definitely a bunch of similarities,” Lacy said of Green Bay and his college home of Tuscaloosa, “because the town is so small and it’s centered around the sport, which Alabama football was super huge coming up and it got bigger as it went along. And you come to Green Bay, (Lambeau Field) is in the middle of a neighborhood, which was shocking to me. I’m like, ‘Wait, y’all got a stadium and they got a house right across the street.’ It’s crazy, but it’s so tight-knit and it’s so much love, and it’s the same in college as it was here.”

Lacy played on two BCS national-championship teams at Alabama. In 2011, he ran for 674 yards and seven touchdowns on 95 carries, providing a 7.1-yards-per-carry jolt as Trent Richardson’s backup. In 2012, Lacy ran for 1,322 yards and 17 touchdowns on 204 carries as part of a 1A/1B backfield with T.J. Yeldon, who ran for 1,108 yards and 12 touchdowns on 175 carries.

In the final three games of his college career, Lacy ran for 452 yards and five touchdowns on 58 carries as the Crimson Tide defeated Auburn in the Iron Bowl, Georgia in the SEC Championship Game and Notre Dame in the BCS championship game.

A second-round choice in the 2013 NFL Draft, Lacy won the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Award as he ran for 1,178 yards and 11 touchdowns on 284 carries and caught 35 passes for 257 yards.

In his second season, Lacy had 1,139 yards and nine touchdowns on 246 rushing attempts and 427 yards and four touchdowns on 42 receptions.

After becoming the only player in Green Bay history to produce 3,000 yards from scrimmage in his first two NFL seasons, Lacy had 758 yards and three touchdowns on 187 rushing attempts and 188 yards and two touchdowns on 20 receptions in 2015.

Lacy hurt his ankle in the second game of the season and had a rib injury coming down the stretch. He lost his starting spot to James Stark in November, but regained it as he posted three 100-yard performances in a four-game span.

But at his end-of-season press conference, McCarthy said: “Eddie Lacy, he’s got a lot of work to do. I think I’m stating the obvious. His offseason last year was not good enough, and he never recovered from it. I had a chance to talk to Eddie today, and that was pretty much the majority of our whole conversation. He has to get it done because he cannot play at the weight that he played at this year.”

Lacy came back lighter for the 2016 campaign, but an ankle injury ended the running back’s season in the fifth game.

Lacy left Green Bay as a free agent for the Seattle Seahawks. But after rushing for 179 yards on 69 carries in nine games in 2017, his career ended.

Lacy said the transition from football star to normal life has taken some adjustment.

“It was extremely difficult,” Lacy said. “I think my first two years I didn’t think about it much because I was still young and I was still kind of like phasing out, but I was still doing the same things that I would do if I was still playing, so it didn’t really hit. But Years 3 to basically now, you kind of reach a spot where it’s like: Well, what do I do now? And it’s like: Well, what do you know how to do? And so you start going down that, and you realize you spent pretty much your whole life doing only one thing, so you don’t know what you can do.”

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.