Hayley Herms may have gotten her “Revenge Body,” but that doesn’t mean she gave up on her new lifestyle when the cameras stopped rolling.
The reality TV contestant, 23, who applied to be on the third season of the Khloé Kardashian-hosted show after enduring multiple traumatic experiences including an abusive father and the death of her mother, told Page Six in an interview how the show has changed her life for the better.
“This show literally just marked a new era in my life,” Hermes, who dropped 64 pounds in the show’s 12 weeks of filming, said. “It gave me a new platform to heal and grow because I had never stopped to heal from my dad, or heal from my mom.”
Hermes, who worked as a plus-size model in Los Angeles before she started the show, kicked off filming by meeting Kardashian and was then paired up with celebrity trainer Corey Calliet.
“He’s a teddy bear, but he will kick your ass,” she said of the trainer who works with Michael B. Jordan.
And with her training schedule, she may as well have been training for “Creed” herself with only two days off per month.
“We were basically hitting the gym every single day for one hour, and then when I wasn’t with him I did two hours of cardio every day by myself,” she recalled. “We at least got our circuit training in [together], and then I’d usually do one hour in the morning, one hour at night [alone], but when I hit a plateau towards the end, Corey had me doing back-to-back hours.”
Those double-hour workout sessions typically consisted of a 7-mile hike where she’d “just haul ass.”
Even though she entered the show with a positive attitude, lingering trust issues surfaced when working with Calliet, which she reveals led to an emotional “meltdown” not caught on camera. Viewers did see a small portion of their resolving conversation where he comforted her and they related to each other with experiences in common.
“For Corey to respond like that and be like, ‘Please trust me,’ from there we were like the dynamic duo, in it to win it, I was able to open up [and] it was great,” she recalled.
The hard work and dedication for Herms paid off as she told us that she now weighs less than she did when she was in the second grade.
“I can’t even imagine how I was living life,” she said. “The weight was just shocking to acknowledge, that I had been carrying around all of that, but I think one of the reasons I was able to lose so much weight [is because] it was like a huge rock was lifted off my soul, and I think it really did translate into weight that I was holding on to my body.”
A huge turning point of Herms’ episode was when she confronted her father over his past abusive behavior. She said she was happy to have cameras present, but the conversation did not result in anything positive. He also didn’t attend her “reveal” where she got glammed up to show off her transformation.
“We definitely do not have a relationship,” she said. “I think they made him look nice on TV, it was way worse than that, I was like, ‘Well, let’s see if his actions meet his words,’ and they clearly didn’t and that was the last straw.”
Today, Herms is working on multiple projects in the entertainment industry. However, she admitted that she initially struggled to establish a realistic workout regimen while adjusting to life off-camera.
“I really had to work through that to remind myself I don’t have to get up at 6 a.m. to go run a mountain, I don’t have to get on my treadmill at midnight,” she recalled, adding that she now works with a new trainer but keeps in touch with Calliet. “I’m OK, it took me a couple months to realize that I could break out of the routine, and now it’s time for what I want.”
She has upcoming modeling gigs in New York and LA and has hopes to go international. Herms also has entrepreneurial goals to open a braid-styling bar as she keeps up her Instagram page as a body-positive influencer.
Since her episode aired earlier this month, Hermes said, “I’ve been enjoying everything that’s coming along, my phone just never stops blowing up.”
“I tell people I didn’t open a new chapter in my life, I opened a whole new damn book!” she added.