The Camera Reveals More than Just What it Sees... Friday, April 5

The May issue of 10 Magazine is going to be a special edition designated to the love of sports and both Snickers and I were asked to be on the cover – awesome! I was so excited about the amazing opportunity but Snickers wasn’t so impressed. He’s used to sporting a sick pack of abs and bulging biceps but lately it’s been me trimming down and toning up. I remember when I first started dating him; I was so incredibly intimidated by him. Here was this gorgeous man who was ripped like a freak of nature and who was at the top of his game – boxing champion. I know looks aren’t everything but when you’re walking down the street and people look at him and then at me, I couldn’t help but think they were asking themselves “Why is that guy with that girl?” Lately the tables have been somewhat turning in that now it’s me who is training like a beast, morphing more noticeably, and I tease him about it sometimes.

I’ve never really thought of body issues to be a guy thing, perhaps it’s because I’ve always dated very confident guys of which two were bodybuilders and one was a pro soccer player, so they was always bombarded with compliments. Snickers will occasionally make a joke about his body, like claim he’s pregnant or say he has a “duck bum” but I’ve never really taken it more than just that, a joke. But tonight, at the photo shoot, he apologized to the photographer for not being up to par with how his body should be and I was quite shocked at this. I’ve never seen this side of him but felt a bit relieved by it and strangely attracted to his vulnerability too.

As strange as it sounds, I find a bit of comfort in the fact that he noted he’s not up to par tonight. I’ve always warned him about the importance of eating healthy and how, though he’s young now, it will catch up to him. I once was harsh enough to call him out on it too; I called his bad eating “selfish”. “It’s selfish”, I told him, “because one day when you’re old and gray, sporting bad health earlier than expected, it’s going to be me that will have to look after you!”

It all goes back to something I once heard-- “Your life is not your own”. Your life is a bigger picture of all the pieces – the people, places, etc – that make it up. Consequently, what you do has a rippling effect on those in it – your family, friends, coworkers, etc. Snickers definitely thinks that him being young and training hard means he’s excused from having to eat clean and it frustrates me. His choices do affect me. Not only does it mean the obvious -- I rarely eat with him-- but there’s obviously future health complications that can potentially arise. Me being so into health and fitness means I cringe whenever I see him eat two packages of raymin at once. I remember once I told him to eat breakfast, so he poured almost a full box of cereal into a pot and ate it. That definitely wasn’t what I meant by breakfast. I’ve been kind of force-feeding him breakfast – cutting up fruit and putting it and a cup of milk in front of him. I can’t say he eats really bad though, I’ve surely seen so much worse, but he loves his chips and excessive amounts of noodles.  It's not so much what he eats that I worry about but his bad eating habits.  He’s all about the one or two big meals a day with some random snacks and it drives me bonkers that he doesn’t eat breakfast.   I think he worst habit is that he loves eating super late.  He's really bad for falling asleep, then randomly wake up at 2 or 3am to cook noodles, eat and then go back to bed. 

Back when Snickers headed off to Japan for about two and a half months, he learned exactly what I meant about the importance of eating healthy. You can’t out train a bad diet nor can you escape it if you’re not even training. When he left Korea, he weighed in at about 65kgs. He had been training 5 days a week, often twice a day, but when he was in Japan his training stopped and he ate whatever the locals fed him. My point about the importance of eating clean was proven when he returned to Korea 2.5 months later, weighing in at 85kgs – 20kgs more than what he initially left as (that’s almost 50lbs for those who don’t do kilograms).  I remember waking up to him, the first night he was back, and thinking that some other man had climbed in my bed.  Once he got back to training and starting eating his usual foods, he was quick to lose the weight.

The plan with our boxing club is that I’ll help him develop healhier eating habits, get him on some kind of eating routine, and he’ll help me train harder. Starting next week he’s going to start doing padwork with me and though I’m intimidated a bit with him coaching me, I know it’ll be intense – it’ll be great. So often I train in my comfort zone and I really have to push myself out of this. This has been my hardest struggle lately and I think a bit part of it has to do with the long hours I’m pulling with working on our boxing club. Being up for an average of 19 hours and then getting single, low digit hours of sleep doesn’t help but I think the problem lies in the fact that I am just so “mentally full”. My head is so busy; it’s constantly obsessing over details with the floor plan, contract numbers, extra expenses, and so forth. I’m really trying hard to enjoy the whole planning and preparing process of it all but sometimes I can’t help but dream about how it will be in even just a month or two from now – when we’ve got a flow going and routine down. Right now it’s just work, work, and more work. Even when I’m out with friends my mind is still working.