Matt Hazard

Enter 2014. I was young, fit, and healthy. Well, I was young. “Fit” is arguable, but at least I was thin. Healthy is also a bit of a stretch, since my doctor told me to consume more grains for fibre content and my primitive brain took that as “beer good”. But hey, I was at least active and weighing in at something near the bottom end of “normal”.

Fast forward almost ten years. Not much has changed, other than I got better at the art of beering, have become motivationally stagnant, and my blood type is Ragu. I swear the batteries in my scale pretended to be dead just so I wouldn’t subject the unit to that kind of torture first thing in the morning. Something had to change, but I didn’t know what. Then, one day in 2023, Nate Diaz changed my life completely.

For anyone not familiar with the gentleman’s sport of shit-kickery, Nate Diaz is a former UFC champ, humble nobleman of Stockton, and vegan. My wife has been a vegetarian for years now, and she was watching a documentary about plant based diets in sports. I happened to walk in right at the part after Diaz famously beat Conor McGregor and was being interviewed inside the octagon. He was asked, “Nate, you just shook up the world. How does that make you feel?” To which he replied, “I ain’t surprised, mother f*ckers.” Boom. That was all it took. I became a vegetarian on the spot.

Now, I’m not going to deny the fact that I have the personality type that gets all hell-bent on a new concept, invest some serious time into it, and then drop it after a week. Once, before I actually quit smoking, I was at a rap show and a famous man by the name of Royce Da 5’9 gave me a cigarette. I swore I’d “never smoke that dart so long as I’d live, it was a gift from a great poet.” That lasted all of 12 hours. So naturally my wife didn’t believe that I’d stick to this newly discovered vegetarian diet that took me .3 seconds to get on board with all because a fighter looked cool in a post fight interview. But oh, how wrong she’d be. I knew this was something that I could stick with, because at work I was in the middle of a weight loss competition with some colleagues. The wager? Pride. All I needed was a little motivation, and that came unexpectedly in a food documentary showcasing a UFC fight clip. My wife began working on a meal plan for me while I strutted around the house quoting Mr Diaz over the next few weeks. I now had the realization that if I quit eating meat, ultimately that would mean that I’d stop going out for fast food. And if I did that, I’d have this little workplace side bet in the bag. And that’s exactly how it played out.

Which takes us here today. A year and a half later. Thirty pounds down, and still on a meatless plant based diet. Not a week goes by that I don’t remind the guys at work how they were all beat by a man who ate what they all dubbed “rabbit food”. I’ll admit, losing the last ten pounds was the hardest, because that required me to give up my weekly membership to beer town with my old buddy Jack Daniels, but hey, I’m right around where I was back when I was 30 years old. Still not fit, arguably healthier, slim and awkward – just the way I like it. All of this, thanks to Nate Diaz. And maybe a little bit to my wife too.