Eating Disorders Awareness Week: Taking Shape
An anonymous G4C member writes about how her experience of gymnastics was accompanied by an eating disorder that it took her 25 years to recover from. This piece talks openly about the brutality of gymnastics, and how she found a better life - free from aesthetic judgements - later in life.
This week is Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and I have been trying to write on the topic of eating disorder recovery in relation to gymnastics, and I am struggling. Internal chatter accompanies me, accusing me of imposing. “You weren’t an elite gymnast, you were only ever a wannabe, your story does not count”. This sounds very much like the eating disorder’s ‘voice’ that plagued me for 25 years: “you weren’t even thin enough, you aren’t thin now, your story does not count, recovery or not”.
I do not believe this. The me I have claimed back, knows that examples of people recovering and thriving in a recovered life, bring hope. I was not an elite gymnast, or even particularly competitive, but gymnastics was part of my life for many decades and became something of a fixation, particularly when it had anorexia as a sidekick.
It's not that I chose gymnastics, but that my body came with a basic subscription of gymnastics already installed. I was too wild for Tumble Tots, so much so they asked us to leave (insurance wouldn’t cover the moves I was throwing), and I preferred cartwheeling down supermarket aisles as a toddler. I mean I would prefer that now, if my body allowed.
At the elite club I was assessed at in the early Eighties (aged 2.5 years), by one half of the married coaching team, my mum and I were told that I had potential but could do with losing a couple of pounds. This was something I likely did not understand at the time and was certainly not something my mum tried to do anything about in terms of restricting food, but I banked those words and collected more as time went by.
I would watch the older (elite) gymnasts at the club in awe and with envy. I can still picture some of them and all I see is the sadness and deadness in some of their eyes. I now know why. On one of my first days in the gym I was crying because I was scared. No parents were allowed in the gym. One of the coaches threw me in the foam pit and smacked me.
There is something very seductive and alluring about gymnastics. Something about saying ‘no’ to gravity, and forces that restrict other people. There is a sense if you work hard enough, if you are light enough, if you are strong enough, if if if …you do xyz, you will succeed but that success lasts only until the next demand…and it is magical thinking really.
So, few make it to the Olympics, for instance, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t invested in gymnastics with a religious fervour too, that they didn’t end up filtering everything through the lens of success in gymnastics terms. I ended up going to a recreational club for years and in one sense that was better for me but in another, I never forgave myself for not being better.
Gymnastics is also magical in a way that defies explanation. It is exhilarating. It is also brutal. I remember at the age of ten secretly thinking I had ruined my life and there was no way to reclaim it at all. This was because I knew that at that age, I had not been disciplined enough to have a serious career as a gymnast. I felt hopeless and, also, knew that those without a love of gymnastics would probably not get it.
I had an idea, though, and it was based on the fictional depiction of Nadia Comaneci’s comeback in the 1984 TV movie Nadia. In the film, Nadia makes a comeback with the help of the Karolyis, with a brutal new regime to get her back in competition shape. This is what I needed, I thought, someone who will force me to be disciplined. The thing is, at the elite club, they would always say there are others who want it more, they didn’t need us. I asked my parents, in all seriousness, if they could send me to Romania to a boarding school with a gymnastics programme. They did not register this as a serious request from what I can recall.
In the end, I found another way to ‘redeem’ myself, to make good, if only in fantasy. At fourteen I began to starve myself. I would swim lengths for hours chanting the names of gymnasts I admired in order to spur me on. I did gymnastics still, and for a short time the weight-loss lead to an improvement in my gymnastics. But eventually I was too faint and weak to do much of any of it.
Of course, not all of this is caused by gymnastics. It’s that I internalised a very toxic idea of what I had to be and do in order to enjoy gymnastics. It got hijacked for me early on with the focus on size and discipline at all costs. I am not going to regale you with tales of the behaviours employed in the service of the eating disorder because that is common currency, no one needs more of that. What I want to focus on is just a few thoughts around being recovered from anorexia after struggling with that beast on and off (mostly on) for over two decades.
I had very many stops and starts when trying to recover from it. I eventually had lots of therapy, mainly psychoanalytic, some sessions with a dietitian, and a lot of working with women who were feminist activists and working against ideas that there is one way to have a body. None of these alone did much, I needed bits of each of them.
I believe at the core of recovery from any eating disorder for many gymnasts is:
Processing grief – e.g. around a body that may no longer be a child’s body, that isn’t mechanical, that has needs you may have been told it shouldn’t have, around what you may have sacrificed for gymnastics, for things you wanted that you couldn’t have, for abuses suffered, for pieces of you and your spirit that may have been crushed, for never being able to experience the embodiment of some of those moves ever again
Celebrating what your body/self enabled you to experience that can be reclaimed
finding who you are with a life that is bigger than can be reduced just to gymnastics, and choosing what place gymnastics has in your life
coming to allow your body to be whatever size it is
slowly dismantling what it means to ‘eat well’ so that you have a true food freedom
finding a home in your body
community and connection.
None of these things happens quickly and I don’t believe they happen easily outside of community.
The biggest mistakes I made in recovering from an eating disorder were:
Thinking I had to be sick enough first (I never felt sick enough no matter how unwell I was)
Believing in BMI and that there were weights above which I would no longer be healthy (look up set point theory, for instance, and the racist, unscientific history of BMI)
Believing I could not trust myself around certain foods. Through a long and scary process, I learnt body-trust for the first time and to eat according to hunger/fullness and enjoyment.
Believing fatness is a bad thing. When I challenged my own internal fatphobia, it meant I worked on detaching awful moral judgements about myself and others linked to size and shape, so that the real issues (my sense of not feeling safe in my body, hating myself for having big feelings, not knowing how to soothe myself without starving myself or eating sweets, and issues around boundaries, etc.) could be focused on.
When you have been an abused gymnast, I think, there are added aspects to recovery.
Especially considering all the abusive practices we bear witness to in the testimonies on these pages. That is that the work may also entail something of a deprogramming of the type that survivors of domestic abuse and religious trauma might embark on in. This is in order to regain choices over one’s thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs, so that you might live without the tyranny of a system and individuals within it that pervert your own inner wisdom, spontaneity, and desire. That thwarted your love of a sport that meant so much.
Today
I miss gymnastics and frequently dream I am throwing punch-fronts through the streets, feeling the rush of air past me, feel free and light. My body no longer allows such feats. There is a sadness but not blame for failure anymore. I wish I could have appreciated my body’s wisdom and strength sooner, but that is what grieving is for. My ears still prick when gymnastics is mentioned. It is like a long-lost love that I will never forget.
However, my life now is beautiful, fulfilling, sustaining and revolves around connection. I often said in recovery from anorexia that ‘people are my medicine’. That is because I could starve in isolation, but really investing in becoming threaded into the tapestry of meaningful relationships helps to block the path of eating disorders and their attempts to sever all connection. Now my days are spent in the final months of training to be a psychotherapeutic counsellor, offering spaces to others on journeys back to themselves, however that might look.
It's time to take shape. I know how strong you are, now it is time to soften. Your home awaits you.
By Eleanor Higgins, UK