Alexa Bliss suffered from a disease early in her life, but took the steps needed to overcome it.
Bliss shared her experiences with anorexia with the New York Post recently. She was open about it, taking about a conversation she had with her mom about the disease and how it could eventually kill her.
I remember my mom sitting me down and telling me I was in the hospital and she was like, ‘You are probably going to die from this’ because the doctors were telling her 1 in 4 people die from it and I was going to be that one because my body wasn’t responding. My heart wasn’t responding. Everything was just going downhill and I didn’t see it. Your brain doesn’t see it. I remember being in the hospital and not knowing why.
I looked in the mirror and said, ‘I’m fine. I look fine’ and my mom is telling me you are going to die from this and I just literally looked at her blankly and said, ‘I don’t care.’
It’s one of those things you don’t know who you are. You become something completely different and it consumes you entire life. It consumes everything about you.
That is why I try to be so open about it because people going through it, it consumes them and you tell them it doesn’t have to. You can move past your eating disorder and not let it have control over your life anymore.
Bliss realized she needed help when she started to see that her own actions were causing her friends to experience the same feelings about their own appearances. She eventually sought help through trainers who were able to help her battle the disease over a long period of time:
I remember my friend Erin telling me she had been in the hospital with me every day. She was there when I got admitted and after I was released. She said, ‘If you think you are fat Lexi, what do you think I look like?’ And then I noticed she was starting to pick her food apart like me. She was starting to count calories like me and it just broke my heart because I never wanted to influence anyone to go through what I am going through and that’s exactly what I had done. That was the moment where I knew I needed to get better.
It was for me and it was for people around me because it doesn’t just affect you, it affects people around you. That fact that I was literally taking my best friend and morphing her into that bad path, it wasn’t OK with me.
My parents put me back in touch with my trainers Mike [Davies] and Natalie [Calland]. They told me I was going to compete [in body building]. I was like 80 pounds and they were like, ‘You are going to be on stage in six weeks. You can either be skinny and embarrass yourself or look healthy and do well, but regardless you are getting on stage in six weeks.’ That was kind of the kick in the butt. Their diets got me comfortable eating food again. It was a very, very long process because this was like a four or five year battle.
Bliss bounced back from the disease, signing her developemenal contract in 2013. She made her main roster debut last year, where she has won both Womens titles on the main roster.
