If you were world champion boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., how would you prepare for the most anticipated and hyped-up fight of the century?
You’d probably train mercilessly, talk a lot of shit about your opponent Manny Pacquiao, maybe pay his sparring partners more to sit at home than to train with him, and hire a personal 24-hour chef to cook you anything you want at $1,000 a plate. Insert uploading Instagram posts of you training and the insanely expensive stuff you bought between any of those and you’ve got classic Mayweather.
As any hard-working athlete knows, your diet while training plays a huge part in how you perform. For Mayweather, his personal chef is the one fueling his body (hopefully to victory), so she will play a big role in how the outspoken and undefeated world champion fairs in his fight against Pacquiao on May 2. So who is the woman “beastin in Floyd Mayweather’s kitchen,” and what has she been fueling Mayweather with?
While working as a personal chef for a celebrity life coach and his family in Los Angeles last summer, pics of her meals were posted on Instagram. Mayweather’s assistant, who also followed the life coach’s Instagram, saw the food pics, followed them back to Q’s Instagram and decided to give her a call the very next day. Chef Q flew out from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to work as Mayweather’s chef for two months and hasn’t returned since.
Chef Q served as the executive chef at Soul Dog in North Hollywood, and she is currently affiliated with caterer Chefism. Now, she’s the best of the best according to Mayweather and his stomach.
I called up Chef Q around noon one day to ask her what it was like cooking for Mayweather and what she’s been feeding him. When she picked up the phone, she sounded like she had just woken up.
As Mayweather’s 24-hour chef, she goes everywhere with him. He always eats after he trains, but he doesn’t stick to any kind of schedule. “We don’t even know what morning and night looks like,” she told me. She explained later on that Mayweather’s busy schedule doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything, not even sleep.
“I just got home at 8 this morning and I’m back up now […] I usually get two to three hours of sleep, which is like a long nap.”
When she’s not watching Mayweather train until the early morning, Chef Q is usually resting at her own place just down the street from his mansion in Southern Highlands Estates, about 10 miles south of the Las Vegas Strip. She doesn’t really have time for much of a life outside of Mayweather’s rigorous training schedule, after all.
When Mayweather is finished training or he’s just hungry, he just calls up Chef Q and she gets to work.
So what kind of diet is Mayweather on? Chef Q is preparing meals that are low-carb, high in protein and includes lots of vegetables. No fast food is ever allowed. When Mayweather first wakes up, for example, he likes to eat an egg-white omelet with vegetables, Chef Q told me.
Mayweather is also a pretty big fan of oxtail, turkey meatloaf, fried chicken, spaghetti, gumbo, and all kinds of fish but especially salmon and tilapia. The one thing he doesn’t eat is pork, according to Chef Q. He’s also not that big on sweets, but he does indulge in Twizzlers once in a while.
“Right now we are really big on juicing,” she added. To replenish Mayweather’s body with vitamins and minerals, Chef Q makes him vegetable and fruit juices that include fresh and organic spinach, kale, ginger, beets, sometimes carrots, and sweet fruits like apples, oranges, red pears, watermelons with the seeds (because the seeds have a different vitamin in them, she says) and pineapple.
When I asked her where she buys Mayweather’s food, I was expecting her to name a premium grocer like Whole Foods — but she actually goes to the local Smith’s Food and Drug because it’s just down the street, and it’s also open 24-hours. With food in hand, she heads to his kitchen to cook. When she cooks, she likes to use healthy oils like olive, coconut and grape-seed oil, but she also cooks with butter. I was a little surprised to hear that she uses regular organic butter, and not the grass-fed butter that high-performance individuals hoard for their precious butter coffee.
So that’s basically what Mayweather has been fueling himself with — the finest organic foods that the local Smith’s Food and Drug has to offer. The store’s organic foods aisle does sell meat, chicken and eggs that are antibiotic, hormone and artificial-ingredient-free; they also claim that their meats are fed an all-vegetarian diet. Chef Q cooks it all up and Mayweather raves that it’s worth $1000 a plate — whatever makes him happy, right?
The Pacquiao/Mayweather fight will take place in less than a month on May 2, but that doesn’t mean that Chef Q’s work will finish after. Whatever the outcome of the fight, Chef Q told me, “I’ll be sticking around in Vegas. After the fight, he still has me working and cooking, it’s just not as much because usually he likes to go out of town and tour the world.”
“I will be going out of the country probably with him and then taking a little vacation and picking up a few more clients until the next training camp.”
Will Mayweather’s personal chef and diet help him lead to victory? Or will his Cold War strategy of trying to out-spend Pacquiao at every turn lead to his first and heaviest defeat ever?
Written by Waylae Gregoire of NextShark
