You know, if your parents didn't have you, they'd be living in a nicer home, driving a Mercedes-Benz, with money in the bank and a boat. But noooooo. They had to have you! You've got to give back!

When I was younger, I ate nothing but fried food. Everything was fried, from oysters to chicken to potatoes to vegetables. When you die in New Orleans, they deep fry you before they put you in the coffin. When we baptize children in New Orleans, we baptize them with a bordelaise sauce; we don't use water.

But if you pick up every other magazine, it is the peanut butter diet, or the cabbage soup diet, and then you go to the radio and you hear that you can drink some solution and you will lose weight overnight. It just does not work that way!

I've been offered big money to promote machines. And high-protein diets, when that was really popular. There was always some new powder or diet plan that somebody wanted to put my name on.

When I talk to kids who are overweight, I see my face on their bodies.

Puberty for me was graduating from Thousand Island salad dressing to Caesar salads. It was like going from hot dogs and hamburgers to beef stroganoff, or from ice cream in a cone to creme brulee.

When I was growing up, I did not exercise at all. I was raised in the French Quarter in New Orleans. If I saw someone running, I would call the police because I thought they stole something on Royal Street.