This will likely be getting talked about in great detail but I am going to mention it anyway because it is such an amazing story. When Gina Carano got word of the fact that the fight with Rhonda Rousey could happen around a year and a half ago, she looked in the mirror and thought to herself that there had to be some major changes in her life if she was going to make this work. While she had sort of disappeared from the public eye following her firing from Disney working on The Mandalorian she had been gaining a lot of weight and had fallen into a bit of a trap of being really big.
Fast forward to yesterday as she weighed in for her upcoming fight on Netflix, and she actually weighed LESS than Rhonda Rousey, a woman who has been involved in fighting and intense workouts for the past near two decades.
She weighed in at just over 141 lbs, and this was well below the limit of 146 that was necessary to qualify for the fight. While she has been kind of private about it, Carano was getting to be in a very bad way in the past couple of years. She says she was pre-diabetic and had difficulty simply moving around in her day-to-day life.
I did watch a bit of The Mandalorian and followed a bit of the controversy about her firing, but I also noticed that while they were filming that she was kinda chonky and I am sure other people did as well. After she stopped getting offers for film and TV though, I guess it was even easier for her to continue the bad habits that lead to her getting a bit out of shape in the first place. There are some pics and video of her looking very "round" that emerged over the years as well.
Carano is in her 40's and for a lot of people, including me, gaining weight at that time in your life is just something that kind of happens to most people. I'm not sure why that is but it's probably a combination of accepting your age and the diminishing attractiveness, a drop in metabolism, and a lot of other life obligations that includes work and perhaps kids that take priority over exercising and diet.
She knew that if she wanted this payday for the fight with Rousey though, that she was going to have to do something and apparently the motivation to turn things around are very much alive in this woman.
Losing nearly half of your body weight not due to an illness is a pretty damn impressive feat and the dedication and effort that she had to put into that is definitely something worth admiring.
Hopefully all this hard work was also combined with re-honing her skills in MMA as well. It's been a very long time since she stepping into the octagon and I'm hopeful that she can put on a good show. This event has been promoted to the gills and here we are, it is upon us in less than 24 hours. I will be kind of tuning into it because even though the card is mostly ex-fighters and has the possibility of being a retirement home of MMA, it also has the opportunity to be a genuine competitor to UFC, who I think has been getting lazy in the past few years due at least in part, to not having any real competition in the marketplace and something like this could be exactly what is necessary to turn the UFC brand around to being interesting and entertaining again.
Regardless of what happens though, Carano's weight loss is extremely commendable. Not many people can claim to done what she has done already. Now let's just hope she can perform in a fight when it counts.