WWE star Natalya reveals she developed an eating disorder following tragic death of Owen Hart
WWE star Natalya was the latest guest on Lilian Garcia's podcast Making Their Way To The Ring, and during the lengthy conversation she revealed for the first time that following the death of her uncle Owen Hart in 1999, she developed and struggled with an eating disorder for years.
You can watch the full interview on YouTube below.
https://youtu.be/oA21Caz_c_I?t=37m47s
“This is the first time I’ve ever talked about this: Nattie exclusive, but I had an eating disorder when I was eighteen and it lasted for about - I mean they say it never really goes away - but it spanned the course of about three years.
I went from a hundred and sixty pounds, in the course of two months after my uncle Owen died, the summer that my uncle died, I lost forty pounds in two months.
And my family was really scared and I remember being very angry at them and thinking like ‘Why are they confronting me? They should be happy, I look great’. I didn’t realize it until years later how crazy and scary I looked losing that much weight.
I was wearing kids clothes and it was a really hard time for me, but I was reeling from the tragedy of my uncle passing away and how that affected my family and also I think because my Dad wasn’t a part of my life because he was working, and busy, and gone.”
"I actually talked to Alexa Bliss about it when she came forward and said she had gone through this I said ‘I just give you so much credit because it takes a lot of courage to talk about it’. You know, since that happened I just never ever shared that publicly with anyone. It was just something I just didn’t want to have to relive but then I also thought you know, again now that Alexa has talked about her situation it made me really respect her more. Because it like, no we can actually raise awareness and help teach young girls that going through something like this is very common.
It’s actually becoming a lot more common with body image. It’s something lots of people go through, whether it’s bulimia, or anorexia, or binge-eating disorder. Me getting into wrestling helped cure that eating disorder and I never looked back."
