Daniel Bryan goes head to head with CM Punk for the WWE Championship at this Sunday’s Over the Limit Pay-Per-View. I had a chance to talk to the WWE Superstar, and former World Heavyweight Champion, about his “Big Gold Belt” title reign, his upcoming match with Punk, what Vince McMahon thinks of him being a vegan, his storyline with AJ and more.

: It’s been crazy. It’s been a lot of fun. I went from being a guy who was sparingly being used on television to being the World Heavyweight Champion and the focus of a lot of the storylines on Smackdown . And now I’m in a big match for the WWE Championship on a Pay-Per-View and it’s unreal.

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No, I never thought that if I was going to be the champion in the WWE that those would be my first opponents. My first feuds. Especially because I also felt like I didn’t match up very well with those guys. But then it seems to me that both of those feuds went very well. And I was thrilled to wrestle those guys because it forces me to go outside my usual box. You know, I could go out there and wrestle CM Punk and have a fantastic match, but that’s along my normal line of thinking. Wrestling someone like Big Show requires a totally different style. And for me that was fun.: I suspect not. It’s interesting because in our first match in the WWE against each other, on Monday Night RAW – it was a Champion vs. Champion match – and we did it. We shook hands before the match. And for some reason, I don’t think that’s going to happen on Sunday.: [laughs] Definitely. And you know what’s funny is that I feel like – not since I started with WWE, but since I got fired and then brought back - they had this storyline with me and the Bellas. Then it was me and Gail Kim. And now it’s me and AJ. It seems like I’m always in these stories with these Divas. And I don’t know what the deal is. Maybe they just see me as someone who’d be funny to pair up with them. Like “Yeah, it would be funny to put him with the Divas.” But I really have no idea.: Yeah, I do. But I think the origin of me and AJ was part of the whole nerd persona. The idea that we were both nerds. Because it started before I was the World Heavyweight Champion and they just started throwing these little thing at me and her backstage and we were supposed to be really awkward. So the idea still started with “Oh, he’s a nerd.” But now it’s evolved into something that’s way better.: Since December of 2009.: No, I didn’t know actually. And I do it for health reasons, you know. Not for entertainment reasons or anything else. So for me it wasn’t even an issue of bringing it up on TV. Other than “Oh, that’s an interesting fact about this guy.” And the idea that you can tell people you’re a vegan and get everyone to go “BOOOO!” is crazy. It’s interesting because the first experience I had with that wasn’t even with the crowd but it was with Vince himself. And Chris Jericho loves telling me this story about how he had gone back to Vince and said “This guy’s good.” It was after the first match I had on TV, and it was against Chris, and he told Vince I was good. “He can get the people behind him,” he said. And Vince said [in Vince voice] “Yeah, but who doesn’t eat steak?” He thought people wouldn’t buy into a guy who didn’t eat steak. And that’s when I kind of realized that there are a lot of people out there who just think it’s completely foreign for me to not eat animals.

More from Daniel Bryan, including the origin of the "YES!" chants, on page 2...