WWE star Natalya recently 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.
Hart — under The Blue Blazer person — infamously died while descending from the rafters during a pay-per-view event.
“This is the first time I’ve ever talked about this: Nattie exclusive, but I had an eating disorder when I was 18 and it lasted for about – I mean, they say it never really goes away – but it spanned the course of about three years,” Natalya said during the lengthy conversation on Lilian Garcia’s podcast “Making Their Way To The Ring.”
“I went from 160 pounds, in the course of two months after my uncle Owen died, the summer that my uncle died, I lost 40 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 [the wrestler Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart] wasn’t a part of my life because he was working, and busy, and gone.”
Natalya said she was inspired by former SmackDown Women’s Champion Alexa Bliss, who has been open about her own struggle with anorexia. Bliss revealed that while training to be a college cheerleader, she dropped from 120 pounds to 80 pounds in the span of six weeks.
“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’s like, no, we can actually raise awareness and help teach young girls that going through something like this is very common,” Natalya said.
“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.”