KDX: The first thing that comes to mind is that when I was younger, I wasn’t fat, but I had a little round shape, like an American football. My Mom had this nickname for me and I hated the nickname. It was basically because I used to kind of walk on my high legs a little bit, so it looked like I was walking with my ass out. [The nickname] was targeting that and I hated that. So that’s really what we got me into fitness, as well as anger issues and boredom. All that combined.
What were your early days in the gym like?
I started with home exercises. I’d do push-ups, diamond push-ups, stuff like that. I just wanted to start losing weight, which turned into wanting to gain muscle. In third year they had an underground gym [at school] and I started going there.
I think I had the most fun in the gym in the beginning, because it was just a sense of growth. Everyone knows, at the beginning, it can just boom because you’re just starting out, so the gains come a bit quicker. When I started going up in strength and stuff, that’s when I was really excited, like, “Oh my God, I’m doing it”.
Did your relationship with your body begin to change?
Definitely, because you take before and after pictures, trying to see the progress. Seeing the work you put in affect your body and change it, it was a confidence booster. So I guess I started looking at my body more like, “Yo, this can go somewhere”. It even got to a point where people around me at the time would be like, “Oh man, he’s so big”, and they wouldn’t want to get in trouble with me because I was big. The fact that I saw people reacting like that, I was kind of like, “Oh, okay, I guess that’s cool”. I started walking around with a little more confidence.
But then it did start to get to a point where every time I looked in the mirror, it was like, “I’m very small”, even though I wasn’t small. It went from, “Oh, I’ve got muscles”, to then, “Man, I’m small. I’m smaller than all the other big guys”. So it went up, down, up, down.