Episode 22 of The Mike O’Hearn Show was published on Generation Iron‘s YouTube channel on Nov. 4, 2022, and featured WWE Hall of Famer Torrie Wilson’s chat with the show’s namesake, Mike O’Hearn, about her previous eating disorders and how she overcame them.
Everybody says your body is made in the kitchen.
While that sentiment may have dominant agreement among the fitness world at large, Wilson feels that her physique was “made in the gym.” Her trajectory to professional wrestling was through being a fitness model, but that path was unsteady. Wilson was anorexic in high school and “started to become bulimic” in college. Once she realized she could change her body through training, it was a new world for her. Check out the full interview in the video below:
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Wilson’s training in the gym was designed to compete in competitions like the Miss Galaxy contest. As she mentioned in the interview, her handful of competitions opened the door for her to grace the covers of fitness magazines in the late 90s, like Muscular Development.
During that time, Wilson went to a World Wrestling Championships (WCW) show with her then-boyfriend. They had access to go backstage to meet the wrestlers, one of whom was fellow WWE Hall of Famer Kevin Nash, who recognized Wilson from a green bikini cover photo she was in.
Nash invited her to perform on-air non-wrestling segments with pro wrestling great Ric Flair. Work begot work, and though Wilson never sought to be a pro wrestler, the money was excellent. She recognized the opportunity’s value — not to mention her growing popularity in the space.
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When Wilson suffered from anorexia, she would leave school for several hours a day to train on the stair climber at the gym but wouldn’t touch the weights. Her body weight at the time was 116 pounds. Her desire to eat and drink in college led to her eating order progress toward bulimia, as she would want to eat but didn’t allow herself to keep it down.
Wilson’s eating disorders derived partly from being bullied in elementary school and partly because she felt being a model was her way out of Boise, Idaho, where she grew up. A modeling agency told her she needed to drop 10 pounds, which she interpreted as the checkpoint for a better future.
We all have the capacity to dig deep and use it as fuel, but we can also go the victim route.
Wilson’s evolution came through building her confidence. She suggests the things that made her feel so bad that she developed an eating disorder in her formative years would be comments she’d let roll off her shoulders in the present day. She feels that anyone trying to tear someone else down says more about that person and their unhappiness than it does about their comments’ target.
Watch O’Hearn’s entire interview with Wilson to get even more details about the WWE Hall of Famer’s journey through fitness.
Featured image: @torriewilson on Instagram
