Natalya is the latest guest on the “INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet” podcast. The WWE veteran discussed several aspects of her life and career during the interview. Here are the highlights:
Getting in better shape:
“So last November, I had to have nose surgery. I had a severely deviated septum. My nose was off the joint. I didn’t know about any of this until I had to get it fixed. My nose was broken and it was off the joint so I had to get my septum and my nose fixed, and when I did that, I had to take some time off from WWE, which for me, I’ve been in WWE for 16 and a half uninterrupted years. So those three months that I had off, I was like I’ve got this time off. I really want to get laser focused and dialed in on my diet and my fitness and my health and just getting in the best shape of my life before I go back to work.”
“TJ, he does intermittent fasting and so I started doing that. I don’t eat anything past a certain time and then I don’t start eating until later in the day the next day so I have this 16-hour window of not eating. I do my cardio. Most of my training, for the most part, I do it in the morning on an empty stomach and then I’m able to eat after that. For me, and everything’s different for everyone, different things work for different people, but for me, it really worked. I would go to bed a little bit hungry and I would see results because I wasn’t eating a lot at night. In the past I would get done with the show and I’d be really hungry and I would feel like okay, I want to go to McDonald’s. I would just kind of let my hair down and you just start to kind of pick around at junk and you have some pizza and you have a glass of wine and so when you go to sleep right after that, it’s just kind of, you know, for me, it didn’t work. I’m five foot five. I got up to like 172. Again, not a bad weight by any means, but I was like, whoa, that was a little high for me.”
Jim Neidhart going into the Hall of Fame:
“He (Bret Hart) made my dad. He helped my dad so much. When I look at it, Bret always says, you know, Jim helped me come out of my shell and Jim helped me find my personality, but when my dad and Bret were going into the Hall of Fame, it’s funny because I was very, very, adamant, at one point it was approached and I was basically presented with the idea of my dad going in by himself and I said, ‘You know, I want my dad to go in with, I want my dad and Bret in there together as the Hart Foundation because that was my dad’s favorite time in his career. That’s when he had the most fun. That’s when he was the most alive. That’s when he just did his best work and Bret just looked out for him so much and they were just so close and such a well-oiled machine.’ So as much as like, at that moment, Vince was like, ‘We can put your dad in by himself’, I was like, ‘I want my dad and Bret together.’ I want them together because my dad would have wanted that. You know, and so that was really cool to be able to do that for my dad. It was something that I know he would have been so excited to be part of the Hall of Fame.”
Bray Wyatt training at the Dungeon:
“Bray Wyatt, before he made his return back to WWE last year, he approached us about training and coming to work in the dungeon, and so we kept it all extremely private because if somebody doesn’t want to be filmed, we don’t post about it. So it can, you know, can be very private, but he was so excited to get in the ring and he was giving everybody promo advice and you could just feel him get excited about it. It’s funny because he said to me when he was in our dungeon, he’s like, ‘Natty, I want to do something for you guys. What can I buy for you?’ He was so giving. He was like, ‘I want to do something, I want to buy something for the school.’ I said, ‘Windham, you don’t have to buy anything. You just coming here and giving advice is just everything’, because after he would be in the ring, he would go around every single person that was there, and again, it was usually between 10 and 15 people, and he embodied what TJ and I want our dungeon to be where it’s you give back. It’s just all about giving back. It’s about helping people. It’s about helping people from every walk of life and Windham was giving everybody advice and saying, ‘What if you said it like this’, or ‘What if you did that like this?’ He was just so giving. That’s what the dungeon is. The dungeon is about us giving back.”
You can check out the interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
