sport news Former UFC champion Ronda Rousey reveals she battled suicidal thoughts after ... trends now

Ronda Rousey has candidly laid bare her struggles with bulimia, depression, and suicidal thoughts - while opening up about the horrifying abuse she has suffered at the hands of her coaches throughout her fighting career. 

The former UFC and WWE star, 37, sat down with Steven Bartlett on his Diary of a CEO podcast to discuss her troubled journey.

She explained that her rocky road started at just eight years old when her father took his own life before she went on to battle eating disorders, abuse and mental health issues.

Ronda, who elsewhere in the interview accused Vince McMahon of creating a 'fundamentally sick environment' at WWE, also detailed how she had tragically suffered two miscarriages and blamed herself, adding: 'I always felt like that was my fault.'

Ronda began by telling the host that her agony began at a young age despite thinking 'everything was perfect and awesome.'

'My dad passed when I was eight. I didn't know but he had broken his back in a sledding accident when we'd first moved to North Dakota and he had a rare blood disorder where he couldn't heal from it.

'He had been receiving diagnoses basically saying he would become a paraplegic and then a quadriplegic and could eventually die.

'We didn't know that he was going through this or dealing with chronic pain or anything like that.

'He ended up taking his life when I was eight... My whole world turned upside down.'

She continued: 'He said he didn't want our last memories of him to be laying in a bed with tubes running in and out of him. He was in a lot of pain all the time but didn't like being doped up on painkiller so he just wanted to go out in his own way.'

Ronda, whose grandfather had also previously died by suicide, said that it had  a long-lasting emotional toll.

'In the long run I felt like it gave me this feeling that even if I feel like everything is okay, everything can come crashing down at any moment.

'I lost any feeling of security even when everything's going great. I feel like the ball is about to drop and that's something I had to work through till this day.'

Ronda, who was teased as a teen for her muscular stature, dropped out of school when she was 16 to do judo full time and moved in with coach Jim Pedros - and quickly began making a name for herself in the sport.

But it was also around this time that she first began struggling with bulimia.

'I had to be a certain weight on a deadline very often. And it's not really a weight that I could healthily stay at and so I would have to cut weight to get there.

'It started to give me a really unhealthy relationship with food where I would hoard food while I was cutting weight - like candy bars and stuff like that - and then after I made weight I would like gorge myself on it.

'I didn't have any resources to help me out with it and so it just kind of spiraled into a disorder.'

Ronda said she would also sometimes make herself sick after eating.

'I remember the first time I did it. I had a childhood coach or something who took me out one day and he basically forced me to have a chocolate shake.

'He was like, "NNo you have to have a chocolate shake come on, it's fine, you train all the time, you need to relax, you have a chocolate shake."

'I felt so guilty about the chocolate shake and I had to make weight that weekend - there was no way I would be able to make it.

'I made myself throw up the chocolate shake and it was cold, it didn't hurt, it wasn't that bad...

'I thought it was a one time thing but the next time I like ate too much and I felt really guilty about it, it just became the panic button... I felt like it was the only thing I could do.'

She continued: 'You have all this outside pressure to be able to maintain the same weight even though as an athlete you're growing and putting on muscle and even getting taller so it was kind of like fighting nature.'

Ronda's health journey only worsened from the outset of her career with little being known at the time about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy - a progressive degenerative disease affecting people who have suffered repeated concussions and traumatic brain injuries.

'People didn't really know about CTE back when I was doing judo and I would get concussions all the time,' the athlete explained.

'"My head hurts, I have photo vision" - I  would say stuff like that and they would just say "stop being a p**sy and keep training."

'I would get dozens and dozens of concussions and never be allowed to stop. 

'I would have to keep training through them and the symptoms would persist for weeks to the point that I was experiencing concussion symptoms more often than I wasn't for a 10-year judo career.'

She explained: 'This is the kind of injury that accumulates over time. It doesn't go away. Every time you get a concussion it's easier to get another one.

'And so by the time I got into MMA it was really easy for me to to get concussion symptoms. I'd rested for a couple years so at first it wasn't so bad but it just got worse and worse and worse with time.'

'I had to keep it a secret from everybody. I

read more from dailymail.....