We'll now call him Iron Supplement Mike.
Mike Tyson is vegan, sports fans. The former heavyweight champ contends he has given up meat, dairy, the whole nine. In the vegan world, this is enormous news — of on a par with Dylan going electric, or Chastity Bono going boy. It's huge — or in Tyson's case, not so huge. He's dropped 130 pounds (or, an entire super featherweight) in this new dietary lifestyle.
About a year ago, Tyson weighed in at 350 pounds. He's now at 220, or about his weight during his boxing prime. Here, in five weeks of My Vegan Summer, the weight loss has been closer to five pounds. Maybe seven. But Tyson has been working out like a madman, too, which is not the case here. Working out like a faintly perturbed man, maybe.
Tyson disclosed this life-altering information — and much more — during a pop-in interview with Paul Howard, Mitch Moss and Seat Williams on ESPN Radio 1100's "Gridlock" sports chat show.
The change in perspective began when Tyson lost his 4-year-old daughter to in a tragic accident at his home in Phoenix. He's since dedicated himself to an intensive regiment of diet and exercise.
As he said on the ESPN program, in a meandering, contradictory, but nonetheless fascinating account: "I became a Vegan. Vegan is where no animal products. No livestock products. Nothing. I just did a lot of training and try to become more faithful in life. I wanted a different life. I felt like I was dying. I had an incident in life where I lost my four year old daughter in a tragic accident at home. I don't know. I didn't want to live anymore. So I said, that in order to go there, I had to change my life. I am going to change everything I dislike about myself. I changed everything that I was as a human being. I started that journey in October or November ... I don't smoke anymore. I wanted to give up everything. I had to change my life. I didn't have a problem with drugs or nothing. I had a problem with thinking. My thinking was broken. That was the solution of my broken thinking using drugs and living crazy. It was just the way I was thinking."
Tyson also said he was so heavy he had difficulty attending to basic grooming functions, such as properly using toilet paper, and took the cameo role in "The Hangover" to "supply my drug habit," though he'd previously said that drugs were not his problem.
Whatever, it's rollicking stuff from the one-time "Baddest Man On the Planet," a moniker he says he disdains today. In recent years, he's been far more the saddest man. But judge for yourself: Link to the transcript here.
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