I had no concept of this [healthy food] until very, very late in life, thanks to a trainer/nutritionist that I met who has been working with me since I was forty-five.
I was very healthy from a young age. I was always known as the healthy kid in my group of friends. My mom had us drink barley-grass powder, and I've taken vitamins and fish oil and multivitamins since I was a kid. My mom just had me doing that for a long, long time. And I enjoy eating healthy. It's not a chore to me to eat healthy food.
I have been a fan of Forty Five Ten since my first visit to Dallas in 2010, when I was working with the hometown competitor.
I have had a very singular kind of life since I started working so young, so I am very used to traveling, working, taking time for myself.
I stay healthy - I mean, I've got a sports background and an athletic background. I was in competitive sports since the age of five. I was a personal trainer before I was an actor and a personal trainer for the first few years while I was acting and getting my thesis.
I think I am very fortunate to have my sister, who is always there to guide me and my food and lodging has been taken care of. Since my basic need of life is secure, when it comes to working, I never appeared like a desperate struggler who needs the job to run the kitchen.
I got a very late start at fatherhood. I'm a late bloomer in general. It took me seven years to get through four years of college. I was five years away from 40 before I had a family, and I had never been around kids much at all. All of a sudden, I was around three boys all the time.
Well, for me the pro-life issue has been something I've been very passionate about since the '70s, and I have been very involved in the pro-life community since long before politics.
For all of my life I'd been extremely healthy. I'd never had any health issues, so to go from being perfectly healthy to having this very rare disease was scary. In a lot of people it is very severe. Some people go blind, you can have neuro-lesions which affect your brain, so I was very nervous.
I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.
I come from a very normal day job, a very normal upbringing, so I had six or seven years working in an office nine to five in human resources. I had the normal life and kind of thought maybe this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life but still had that passion and that yearning for music.
I have a nutritionist living with me, cooking my food, weighing it, portioning out a lot of things, and it's very detailed now.
If there was ever a food that had politics behind it, it is soul food. Soul food became a symbol of the black power movement in the late 1960s. Chef Marcus Samuelsson, with his soul food restaurant Red Rooster in Harlem, is very clear about what soul food represents. It is a food of memory, a food of labor.
The cure until the late 1940s, when there was an antibiotic discovered for tuberculosis, was basically rest. It was fresh, cold air, lots of food - five meals a day, lots of sleep, not very much talking, and for some people, complete stillness.
I mean, Princess Margaret had me officially informed by the master of the household that she wouldn't speak to me until I changed my religion. That was not personal. We'd only met for five minutes. That was historical. She never spoke to me in 25 years. We were always very polite to one another, but we didn't speak.
Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.
At Rain Man, I was 38. And before that, I had really just started working when I was 36. I was very late. So I've got time, right? As long as I stay healthy and eat right.