I don't know what would happen to me if I ate a bacon sandwich, but I'm just not interested.
I have to confess that I've never been a great fan of Christmas or, as it's known in our house, The Monster That Ate the Last Third of the Year. It's mostly the rampant consumerism I object to, but I'm also a little wary of the annual crop of new Christmas stories and sometimes wonder why anyone bothers.
Life was so much simpler in pre-video days when everyone refused invitations because the 'Forsyte Saga' was on. Now we all just have a long list of unwatched shows, all of which, it seems, our friends are raving about. I feel as outdated as if I wore a Fair Isle sweater, ate Pot Noodle and had a two-bar electric fire in the sitting room.
Mobile is a seaport town, and we ate a lot of seafood. We'd go fishing, we'd catch our fish and we'd eat our fish. It was a ritual on Saturday morning for all my family - my grandfather, my brothers, my uncles, my father - to go fishing, and then the ladies of the family would clean the fish and fry them up.
My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day.
A lot of my struggles with nutrition date back to my swimming days. I was a super-skinny young girl who would go through hours of intense training. Afterward, I'd be famished, but I had a two-hour trip home before dinner. When I did my hardest workouts, I often ate less; I was too tired to think about food.
I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.
I was such a wallflower in high school. I did a lot of extracurricular theatre shows, but at school, I spent a lot of time by myself. I ate lunch by myself, and I was always okay with it. But I was definitely made fun of, and I always felt like an outsider.
I do the same exercises I did 50 years ago and they still work. I eat the same food I ate 50 years ago and it still works.
I can remember 1987 when I had my first amateur fight in Michigan, weighing 64lb. I was 10 years old. I was the youngest and smallest guy on my team. I can remember what I ate. There was this restaurant called Ponderosa, and my dad made me eat a steak. I was happy. It was a first round knockout. I slept with my trophy for two weeks.
