Get ready to laugh out loud, because we’ve got ‘Fluffy Breaks Even’ funnyman Gabriel Iglesias in the house! So how’d he get the name Fluffy anyway? “A cat,” jokes Gabriel. “No, one time I called myself fat around my mom, and she said was like ‘You’re not fat, you’re fluffy!” He’s brought along a trunk full of mystery items, and Rach has to guess what they are – watch the hilarious game in the video below. – Click here to watch the video!
Born in Chula Vista, California, Gabriel Iglesias is the youngest of six children, raised by a single mother. Growing up, the family lived in Section 8 housing in Long Beach, CA. It was during his childhood that he developed a strong sense of humor to deal with the obstacles he faced.
In 1997, he set out to hone his comedic skills, and performed stand-up anywhere he could find an audience; including biker bars and hole-in-the-wall joints. Gabriel’s stand-up comedy is a mixture of storytelling, parodies, characters and sound effects that bring his personal experiences to life. His unique and animated comedy style has made him popular among fans of all ages.
Iglesias is one of America’s most successful stand-up comedians, and performs to sold-out concerts around the world. He recently had the distinct honor of being one of the few comedians to headline and sellout Madison Square Garden in New York, The Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, and The Honda Center in Anaheim. Iglesias is currently on the road for his #FluffyBreaksEven concert tour!
Magic Mike XXL Star Gabriel Iglesias Talks Losing Weight and Taking His Turn on the Pole in Fluffy Breaks Even
BY GABRIELLE OLYA•@GABYOLYA
Gabriel Iglesias may not have had a chance to strip on screen during Magic Mike XXL, but now he’s taking a turn on the pole for his new reality show Fluffy Breaks Even.
The show follows the comedian, 39, on tour as he travels across the country and tries out local food spots – and then exercises off the calories in an attempt to “break even.”
“The concept of the show is basically everything that we’re already doing on the road,” Iglesias tells PEOPLE. “We’re always going out to get a bite to eat, and we’re always trying to find a way to be accountable for it.”
Prior to going on the show, Iglesias lost 100 lbs. by cutting out carbs and practicing yoga, after weighing in at nearly 450 lbs.
“It wasn’t that I wanted to [lose weight],” he says. “Believe me, I had no problem going out and eating anything and everything that got in my path, but I’m pushing 40 now and I’m a type 2 diabetic, and little by little I’m starting to have more problems with each year that goes by.”
At his highest weight, Iglesias experienced blurry vision and noticed that he was losing sensation in his fingers and feet.
“Those are the early stages right before stuff gets really bad, so either I let it keep going or I do something about it,” he says. “Now I’m staying more on top of my medication, staying on top of making sure my sugar doesn’t get out of control, and I think that by us adding the camera to it, it keeps us more in check. I don’t want to go back, but at the same time I still want to be able to indulge a little bit from time to time.”
Those indulgences – filmed for the show – included giant steaks and massive amounts of cheese.
“We had some Tomahawk steaks – imagine a 3-foot-long bone with a giant steak at the end of it,” he says. “There was also this one restaurant where they brought us a 20-lb. block of cheese with a cheese slicer as an appetizer!”
But just as out-of-the-box as Iglesias’ meals are his exercise sessions – the actor did everything from CrossFit to UFC training to pole dancing, and even zombie apocalypse training.
“They had us doing stuff like pushing trucks out of the way, running with assault rifles, crawling under barbed wire, flipping tires,” he says. “It was pretty intense! Plus the fact that it was outside in the heat and we were in military fatigues, it definitely was a workout.”
Fluffy Breaks Even premieres Oct. 1 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Fuse TV.
`Fluffy Breaks Even` premieres Oct. 1st at 10pm ET/ on Fuse TV. And tickets go on-sale Oct. 2nd for his Dec. 26 & 27th shows at Microsoft Theater on www.axs.com. This segment aired on the KTLA Morning News Thursday, October 1,2015.
EXCLUSIVE: Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias has signed on to voice the character of Cuatro in the 20th Century Fox animated film Ferdinand and is also set to voice Jokey in Sony Pictures’ upcoming Smurfs: The Lost Village. The latter is dated for April 2017, while Fox will release Ferdinand around Christmas 2017. The cast deals come as Iglesias gears up for his “Fluffymania World Tour” to celebrate 20 years of comedy. The stand-up tour kicks off February 2 in Dallas and he will hit several U.S. cities before heading to Europe. He also will be on Facebook Live tomorrow at 10 AM PT when ticket sales begin.
Iglesias co-starred in both Magic Mike films and starred in the stand-up comedy concert film The Fluffy Movie. He also is reprising his role as Jimmy in The Nut Job 2 joining Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph.
Ferndinad, from Blue Sky Studios, is adapted from the children’s book written by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson about a bull who would rather sit under a tree and smell the flowers than venture into a bullfighting ring.
Iglesias will be releasing his sixth one-hour comedy special, I’m Sorry For What I Said When I Was Hungry, on December 20 on Netflix. His TV show Fluffy Breaks Even launches its third season on Fuse TV next year. He is repped by CAA and Arsonhouse Entertainment.
Article: by Anita Busch | deadline.com
The 39-year-old comedian sat down with BuzzFeed to discuss his struggles with weight loss and how he maintains a healthy diet on the road
Gabriel Iglesias, the 39-year-old stand-up comic who’s starred in such films as Magic Mike XXL and The Fluffy Movie and the upcoming reality series Fluffy Breaks Even on Fuse, took time to chat with BuzzFeed about his personal mission to lose weight — 118 pounds in two years — and stay healthy.
“It has nothing to do with the way I look,” he tells BuzzFeed. “The amount of attention that I get as a big dude is amazing. I’m trying to improve my [health] so I can be around. I got no problems with how I look.”
As Gabriel reveals in The Fluffy Movie, he saw a doctor after “waking up every morning with a 300-plus sugar level.” He was told he had two years to live: “That’s the biggest wake-up call you can get. Your habit is hurting you. You need to check yourself. You still have a chance.”
Gabriel, who has diabetes, talks about how the disease was destroying his body: “There was one point where the back of my legs were almost black from poor circulation… I was pushing 437 pounds so I had really swollen legs… The skin was cracking on the inside part of my legs. There were parts where I was bleeding.”
“My vision started messing with me. And then my kidneys right now are still messed up from it.”
Gabriel spoke about his friend Martin, a fellow stand-up comedian and travel companion, who’s helped him maintain a healthy lifestyle.
“It’s one of those things where we help each other out. … We pushed each other. He doesn’t get enough credit for that.” [When we’re on the road], our goal is to find a gym. We’ll get ourselves to go to the gym together and once we’re in there, we go off and do our own thing. Because everybody has their own way and their own level of working out. Martin is all about lifting. He’s got that penitentiary body. I can’t keep up with him. But he’ll get me into the door. And once I’m inside the gym, I’m like, all right. I’m here. I’m not just gonna sit down. I’ll go hit the treadmill, I’ll go hit the elliptical, I’ll go lift weights, I’ll go do something.”
Gabriel said his girlfriend helped him to lose weight and start eating healthy:
“When I’m home, I’ll take her out somewhere to go eat, and she’ll pick apart my plate. She’ll be like, ‘You know what’s in that?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Fuck! I guess I’m not taking you out to eat tomorrow! I should eat by myself!’ But she was one of the first people who said, ‘You know what? You gotta check yourself. I don’t want you to die. I want you to be around.’ She was the first one who started helping me because I was making her big, too. The reason she started to get overweight was because of me. She was the first one that went and started working with a trainer. And that trainer would become the trainer that I work with now. But yeah, she was the first one who really pushed for this healthy lifestyle.”
Gabriel explains what it was like to finally embark on an exercise regimen: “I wanted to give up. Day one I was like, ‘this hurts. I don’t like this.’ The first couple of days I didn’t like it. There was a point when I cried. I was sad. But I told myself, ‘If I don’t do this, then I’m gonna be gone.’ Everything was hurting. And it was frustrating. I’m not enjoying what I’m eating. I’m not enjoying this physical pain that I’m going through right now. I’m not enjoying the sweating. I’m not enjoying the soreness. I’m not enjoying any of this. So it was like, ‘UUUUUUUGH!’ You want to give up. Most people give up. People join the gym and a couple of weeks later, they’re like, ‘I can’t take this pain. I’m out.’”
As a big man, Gabriel is cautious when trying to do any type of cardio: “With my weight, I can’t hang. In the [promo for the show], you’ll see me sprinting, but only for that day and that day only… It takes its toll on my knees.”
Because of his knee issues, Gabriel took up DDP Yoga — a type of yoga developed by former wrestler Diamond Dallas Page (that also helped spawn this viral video): “DDP Yoga worked out in the beginning because I was pushing 450, and so it’s very low-impact. There’s not a lot of hitting on the joints. Your own body weight is the workout. At 450, it was hard for me to go to the floor and then get back up without using a table, or a chair, or something. So when the workouts would start, I needed to put a chair next to me so I could grab it to get myself up.”
“Eventually, I could go straight to the ground and then get right back up. Even right now, my knees hurt, but I could go down, do push-ups, and then get right back up.”
As a stand-up comedian, Gabriel is constantly traveling from city to city. Because of this, healthy food options are limited. So he adapts fast food to fit into his healthy lifestyle: “If I go to Jack in the Box and I order a grilled chicken sandwich, I won’t eat the bread. But I’ll eat the grilled chicken itself. I could order four of those sandwiches, and as long as I don’t eat the bread, that’s four pieces of chicken that I can kill.”
Gabriel loves Chipotle: “My favorite thing in the world is to eat Chipotle. I don’t feel restricted when I eat one of those. I’ll have triple chicken, with barbacoa on it, a little bit of sour cream and cheese. No carbs. No sugar. Take out the rice, take out the beans, don’t put corn (the corn will mess you up, too), and I eat this every single chance I can.”
While Gabriel is conscious of what he puts in his body, he still has the occasional cheat meal: “I like going to The Hat. They have the best grilled cheese sandwiches, with the sourdough bread, and they put like four pieces of cheese in it. So freakin’ good. I also like The Hat’s chili cheese fries with pastrami. So good, man! Both of those together with a Cherry Coke.”
“I feel like an asshole when I’m done,” he says.
When it comes to the drunchies, Gabriel says, “I try to avoid them. But it’s hard. I’ve woken up with wrappers. I’ve woken up with Taco Bell wrappers on me or I’ll wake up and there’s a burger on the floor and I’m like, ‘How the hell does a burger wind up on the floor?’”
“I’ll get drunk maybe once or twice a month. That’s in comparison to the four times a week that I was doing.”
“The thing with weight loss is, you see stuff on TV and everything is ‘LOSE WEIGHT NOW!’ ‘IN 90 DAYS!’ The people you see working out in these commercials are already fit. They don’t show you that really big guy doing these programs. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, if I can’t do it quick, then I don’t want to do it.’”
“Don’t expect to do it in a day. It’s all baby steps. One. Day. At. A. Time.”
By:
Sitting at Long Beach’s Parkers’ Lighthouse overlooking the ocean, comedian Gabriel Iglesias pulls out his cellphone. Scrolling through the notes section, he lands on a page dated Dec. 30, 2012. On it is the skeleton of the idea bringing him back to television screens on Thursday night, an unscripted show about his struggles eating healthy and working out while on tour.
“I love shows like ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’ or ‘Man v. Food’ where they get to go eat,” he said. “They get to go eat. They don’t have to tell jokes or nothing. I said to myself, ‘I want that gig.’”
Noshing on the restaurant’s cheesy bread and Chilean seabass (which he has at least twice a month), Iglesias remembered calling his agent and making the pitch. Three years later, the show, called “Fluffy Breaks Even” is coming to fruition on Fuse.
Every week audiences will get a behind-the-scenes look into Iglesias’ touring life. As he travels across the country, he and fellow comedians Martin Moreno and Rick Gutierrez tweet to their followers about the best places to eat in each city. Each episode shows the trio having a meal followed by a unique workout to burn off the calories they’ve just consumed, all while the comics hilariously riff on the experience.
And both the meals and the workouts are intense. Memorable dining experiences include the Barn Door in Odessa, Texas, whose massive Tomahawk-style steak was preceded by a 20-pound block of cheese as an appetizer (No, they didn’t eat it all). Moreno also loved Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken in Memphis, Tenn. As for the workouts, they included everything from pole dancing to Ultimate Fighting Championship training to a military apocalypse survival course.
“I don’t want the fans to think, ‘Oh he’s messing around. He eats like he’s serious, but he doesn’t take that workout like it’s serious,’” Iglesias said.
But the San Diego-born funny man is serious and hopes his fans will be able to see that through the show, if not the over 100 pounds he has lost since he began eating better and working out.
This inclusion of his admirers into his personal struggles is a stark cry from the guy who got his start on April 10, 1997, at a show in Long Beach.
“When I first started doing stand-up, I was smoke and mirrors, just voices and characters,” he said. “There was no substance. I didn’t talk about myself. It was very safe. But when I started incorporating real things about myself, it got to a point where I was using the voices and sound effects just as like frosting on the cake.”
Iglesias has since made a career out of a nickname many would shun. Known to his fans as Fluffy — because, in his words, he’s not fat, he’s fluffy — the former “Last Comic Standing” contestant continually sells out shows internationally and contributes to box office hits like the “Magic Mike” franchise. But after at one time pushing almost 450 pounds, his doctor warned him of the health concerns related to obesity and diabetes.
“I was all back, like a turtle,” he joked about the amount of weight he formerly carried. “But it was one of those things where I’ve been this character of Fluffy, but I needed to find a way to let people know that my comedy isn’t going to change, but I physically need to change. By incorporating it into my [stand-up] show, I [was able] to explain it, to let them know, ‘You’re in on the ride.’”
Moreno and Gutierrez join Iglesias on this journey of weight loss and health management as longtime friends and colleagues.
“To lose weight, you have to be on a friend basis to mess with each other and get each other up to go do things,” Gutierrez said. “We push each other and it’s also fun.”
Moreno credits the show and Iglesias’ former weight issues with also helping him better his life, which at the time was full of “drinking heavily and eating crap,” he said. But after they got physicals and blood work almost three years ago, they made a commitment together.
“That was a big life changer for me,” Moreno said. “Out of all the things we’ve done together, that’s the one thing I’m eternally grateful for.”
As for the comedy, audiences should only expect Iglesias, with his signature Hawaiian shirts, to get better. In the meantime, he’s just trying to break even on the scale.
“Fluffy Breaks Even” premieres Thursday at 10 p.m. on Fuse.
Restroom, john, privy, outhouse, loo. Call it what you will, but for comedian and “Magic Mike XXL” actor Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, the private bathroom at his Signal Hill compound is a sanctuary.
“Whether I’m at home or on the road or in the lobby or on a plane, I’m never alone,” said Iglesias, 39. “If I’m in that bathroom, people leave me alone.”
The 172-square-foot bathroom is one of four in the comic’s 14,404-square-foot Signal Hill compound, where he stores his touring merchandise. It’s become a home away from home that sits five minutes from his Long Beach residence.
Iglesias is in the second season of Fuse TV’s “Fluffy Breaks Even,” a weekly peek into the comic’s touring life, and recording a one-hour special for Netflix.
But the funnyman says his compound is no joke.
“There is a kitchen and a lounge and couches and fish tanks. It’s a glorified man cave. People say this is the world’s greatest man cave,” he said. “But there are no bedrooms. If I had bedrooms, I would probably never leave.”
What’s the best part about your bathroom?
The room has a remote-controlled TOTO toilet. When you’re done making magic, you hit one button and a jet of water cleans you. You can control the pressure and the temperature of the water. It’s got a dryer feature that blows air. It’s magical.
Anything else?
There’s a sign on the door that makes it clear that it’s mine. The sign has my logo on it, but I’m having a keypad installed so that I can lock it and unlock it. I have a giant shower, a urinal, a shoe rack, a bench, a ton of drawer space, a closet and an amazing sink.
What makes the sink “amazing”?
It’s not full of hair, long hairs. There are not brushes everywhere. If I put a toothbrush on the edge of the sink, when I come back the next day, it’s still there. That’s what makes it great.
Besides the obvious, what else do you do in that bathroom?
For the most part I like to sit and listen to music.
Do you work on your stand-up routine there?
No, nothing is practiced offstage. I can only work on my shows while I’m doing the show. I don’t put pen to paper. What you see is what you get.
How green is the compound?
The entire Fluffy compound is run on solar power. It’s so green that we have had issues with plumbing because of how little water we use.
You have transcended from being a Latino comic to gain mass appeal. How did you do that?
A lot of it has to do with what I’m not doing. I don’t get political. I try not to talk about religion. And I don’t talk about sports. Those three things will divide a room in half. I’m not squeaky-clean, but it’s not a foul show. It’s a show where you would feel comfortable bringing your family.
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