Worst Cooks Celebrity Edition: Why Tracey Gold’s Win Was So Inspiring

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Actress Tracey Gold took home the top prize on Worst Cooks In America Celebrity Edition: That's So 90's, and her win was inspiring not only because she had become a better cook for her family, but because of her past battle with anorexia. On the season finale of Worst Cooks, mentor Anne Burrell chose Tracey (from her Rockin' Red Stars Team) to represent her. Tracey went head-to-head with Blue Team member actress, Jodie Sweetin and her mentor Jeff Mauro, to compete for the chance to cook a restaurant-quality three-course meal for the guest judges Ilan Hall, Nilou Motamed, and Ayesha Nurdjaja. They chose the champion through a blind tasting. With this meal, Tracey earned $25,000 for the Surfrider Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting the world's oceans and beaches so they can be enjoyed.

Tracey became an actress at the age of 4, and is best known for playing the studious sister Carol Seaver for seven seasons on the hit series, Growing Pains. Throughout her life, Tracey has been very open about how being a child actress put undue pressure on her to maintain a certain weight. She revealed that she started thinking about dieting around the age of 7. When she was 11, she was diagnosed with the early stages of anorexia nervosa by her family pediatrician. After counseling, Tracey returned to an appropriate weight for her teenage years. However, when she was 19, Tracey gained some weight, and the Growing Pains scripts often featured jokes about it, which were made at her expense. In October 1988, she went on a medically-supervised 500-calorie-a-day diet, and went from 133 pounds to about 110 pounds, but the scripts still had weight-related jokes. By 1991, Tracey was starving herself and vomiting, losing so much weight that