Growing up, I always wanted to do kickboxing, and I always loved it, but my father just didn't want me in it, so I unfortunately never got involved.

At the age of 18 I saw an MMA video DVD at the video store on mixed martial arts and ended up hiring it. I loved it and joined the local gym which had Mixed Martial Arts Brazilian jiu-jitsu – all those sport arts.

I started karate, jujitsu, mixed martial arts, and went on for a couple of years. I lost a lot of weight – I was 120 kilos at the time, and dropped down to 73 but I didn't realize I was that heavy and I didn't even realize that I lost the weight because I was having so much fun.

I hadn’t had top surgery yet, at the time I was training with electrical tape on, training with binders. It’s very challenging in a sense, when you got hoodies on, so I did probably lose weight from just wearing clothes.

When I dropped the weight, I wanted to compete.

McDojo Gym is a term for some gyms where the trainers wear a black belt but they're not, so they're posing as a fake. So I was at a culty gym that was all about cults. I ended up leaving it and went to another one and started Muay Thai and kickboxing. But the trainer I had forced me to fight, by pushing to “build my rep as a man.”

I ended up tearing my anterior cruciate ligament after class and I couldn't train anymore. I got a bit depressed but I ended up getting into Pad Holding because that was all I could do, was hold pads.

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