Part 3- Another Way
During the height of my training, I could not watch a video of my skating without picking apart my body first. My coach, Cindy, used a lot of helpful tools when working with me on my jumps and spins, videos being one of them. She took videos of me daily, and it was one of the best ways I learned from my mistakes. I could see them. The caveat is, I always had to watch it twice. The first time, I would scrutinize my body and what it looked like. The first time, I wasn’t looking at technique. I’d then say, “Okay, rewind-- I want to see it again”. The replay was where I’d focus on the skating, or the hip out of alignment, or to fix something with the timing. Whenever I go back and watch old videos, I have to make a conscious decision not to examine my body.
I think any woman can relate to this in one way or another. We look at a picture taken of ourselves, and scrutinize our bodies or appearance before we even think about the backdrop or other people who might be included. Most of us have perfected the subtle art of “how to take a flattering picture”—how to position the legs, arms, angles, “good sides”… the picture has to be painted perfectly or else it gets deleted. Forget being real; it’s about being perfect. I’ve felt trapped in my insecurities and shame of my own body whether it’s just an “off” day or years of disliking my own reflections in the mirror--or pictures in my iPhone. Not everyone “hates” their bodies, but it’s likely there’s been an insecure day or two as a result of what’s happening on the outside. This is not just figure skating. This is women. This is men. This is a struggle for athletes--those who run track, swim, dance or cheer. I know this isn’t specific to skating. This is a universal, human struggle.
I’ve been asked, more times than I can count, why I stopped skating. It’s a fair question. You can’t just go from both skating, coaching and basically living on the ice, to saying “Just kidding, I’m moving to Hawaii!” without someone questioning, “What the hell is going on here?”. Every time the question comes up, I never know how to answer it without feeling some shame or grappling fear. So, I just say the easy thing: “Personal issues,” or “It was time,” or jokingly, “I was tired of being cold.” Avoiding the truth, the vulnerability, is easy. I can easily talk about my experience to someone close to me and completely lay it out there on the table without hesitating. But strangers? Nope. They don’t need to know this about me. And the internet? The internet definitely doesn’t need to know this about me. I’m friends on Facebook with some dude I went on ONE date with in San Francisco. He doesn’t need to know this! The community on Kauai doesn’t need to know this. It’s scary. The internet is full of strangers and acquaintances alike. It’s full of these people stewing in their cups of judgement, and that’s my biggest fear.
But I’m going to go ahead and write about this anyway.
Because it’s the strangers and friends and skaters that might need to read this. The skaters, of all ages, who have ever for a single minute disowned and shunned their bodies, that need to see this. So, if you’re wondering why I stopped skating, there we go. I’m not here to be an “influencer” or a “blogger” because it seems like everyone has a platform like this these days. I’m not doing this for the likes. I hope that one person can read this, and feel less alone. Shit, maybe it can help me feel less alone.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is taking a step away from the thing that grabbed me from the depths of my rock bottom. It gave me a hand and said, “Come with me”, and I followed it into the light. That thing that saved me—it also broke me. It feels so odd to say that about my skating. That it broke me. It’s dramatic. It sounds like I’m over-exaggerating—but sometimes hyperboles are a place we live and feel. It’s the reality. It’s the highest mountain I’ve had to climb. For a long time, though, skating saved me.
And that’s the problem. I relied on everything outside of myself to either “save me” or “break me” and the inner voice I chose to listen to was out of my control. The antidote is—I have always been in control. I’ve always had myself, and I wish I had known that nothing outside of that little beating heart of mine is going to make or break me. Through every single obstacle, frustration or pain that life brings, the ice was always there. It was there every time I climbed to the top of the podium in hopes that my victories would show me what I was worth. That I was enough.
I stopped skating because it was too triggering for my eating disorder.
The part that feels so awful, in addition to our own feelings that we stew in, is how isolating it is. Eating disorders are meant to make you feel alone. How many dinners with friends, vacations, relationships, friendships…where compromised because of this? I can remember, at the height of my eating disorder, saving all my calories and carbs to have poke or frozen yogurt with some friends. As in, I had ¼ of a cup of oats for breakfast, some spinach for lunch and that was the only way I could justify having such a high calorie meal. I had dreams about the rice and the carbs because it was what my body needed. I remember getting to the counter to order and chickening out, saying, “No rice please” because rice was scary. It was prohibited. Do you know how many carbs and calories are in 100 grams of rice? I can still tell you off the top of my head.
Current me wants to shout and shake that version of myself and say “EAT the damn rice Amanda.” And then I stop myself because that’s not how I like to talk to myself anymore. That’s what recovery looks like, especially for me. It’s being nice and kind and understanding to myself. I used to be such an asshole. I now correct myself, my inner-dialogue, within minutes to bring a softer, more understanding voice.
“I understand why you didn’t’ eat the rice. You’re coping with something you don’t understand right now. But it really won’t kill you to eat this. In fact, your body needs these carbs right now. Those programs you’re struggling through? You need fuel to help you get through them. They don’t feel labored because they are hard. They are labored because your body is in starvation mode. Get help. Soon. I love you and I promise one day this will all end.”
The tricky thing about eating disorders is that they come in many, many different forms.
I used to get praised for how “in shape” and athletic I was, because my body does not warrant a stick-thin frame or appearance. I was an athlete, and that’s where my body will always be. We tend to look at eating disorders with a one-track lense. We see someone emaciated, stick thin, bones exposed through paper-thin skin, sunken in eyes, white skin complimented with a feeding tube. That, to mostly everyone, is what an eating disorder looks like. It can be such a toxic belief to have because someone like me was in denial that I had a problem because I didn’t look like that. I barely looked like I was starving or withering away, but if you peeled back the layers of denial, you’d see my mind on a constant loop of what I was going to eat and when, all the “body checks” in the mirror, all the times my stomach grumbled before I went to sleep at night because someone told me it’s always a good idea to go to bed hungry.
It usually starts with a belief, a programming we received about our bodies as children, and then slowly starts to creep in at a later stage in life. Usually it’s a result of trauma. Eating disorders have nothing to do with the actual food and losing weight, they are deep down a way with coping with pain. Food and weight to eating disorders is like drinking for an alcoholic. It is not the problem. It’s a symptom of the problem. For many, it brings a sense of control when life feels out of control. For me, the real symptoms happened after a debilitating breakup and an existential self-worth crisis that left me in control of only one thing: my body. `
We don’t just wake up one day with an eating disorder. It’s not like catching a cold. It’s a slow burn, a slow spiral that starts with small changes. Mine started with over-exercising, camouflaged by my “training”, and the food scale.
The damn food scale. I’d like to know how much time I wasted weighing and tracking every single bite of food I put into my mouth. I got my calorie expenditure from the internet, ordered the food scale on Amazon, and I was in business. I did this for over 3 years.
I don’t know where my future lies with my own skating, but I know my purpose is tied to it. The beautiful thing about struggles—is we all have them. We all struggle, and we have all been through more than a few life experiences that have rocked us and left us broken. It’s what we do with the struggle that matters the most.
There’s a serious problem in the world of figure skating. There’s little to no resources in our small little bubble for this serious issue. Body image and the obsession with being as tiny as possible is an unspoken rule on the ice. We all feel the pressure. We all size each other up, but we suffer silently. The pressure comes from all directions. I see it coming from parents. I see it on the faces of girls who start to lose a significant amount of weight and the other little girls who follow suit to do the same. I’ve heard many remarks from coaches about a skater’s weight that didn’t mean anything at the time, but it reinforces the problem. The problem is the silent acceptance that “this is just how it is”.
Alina Zagitova, the Russian skater who won the Olympics in 2018, is quoted saying this in an interview:
“In terms of puberty, when one is getting fat – I think it’s all nonsense. Just close your mouth and don’t eat! Or eat, but a little bit. I eat, I have small bites now and then,"
It was said that at the Olympics, she didn’t drink water during the competition. She would take a small sip and spit it out, like it was Listerine. When these sort of things are quoted, by the Olympic champion, what do you think that says to athletes that might look up to her? What does that say to younger girls and boys in the sport who struggle with their bodies?
Brian Boitano was quoted at one time saying that when he was hungry, he felt strong. I don’t even have the exact quote or source, but it’s engrained in my memory because I used that as fuel. I was inspired by his hunger.
US Figure Skating does have policies that “discourage” coaches from making off-hand comments about skaters’ bodies and claims that weight shouldn’t be an indicator for performance. But that’s just a slap on the hand. There’s work to be done. There’s a trend with the elite skaters in that they struggle with their diet and body image, and it trickles down to someone like me or even 7-year-olds learning double jumps. I believe that US Figure Skating needs to bring in resources, awareness and formal training for this disease. Not everyone is going to the Olympics, not everyone is going to win Nationals or go on to skate professionally, but an Eating Disorder can follow them for the rest of their life.
When I moved to San Francisco and ultimately left my “career” in sales to get back on the ice and continue coaching—I began to notice the flaws in our little world and how damaging the formative years on the ice could be. One morning I was lacing up my skates in the lobby, and I started talking to a Mom of one of the skaters. Her daughter was 14, and she had started to shrink. I say “shrink”, because I’ve seen this so many times. A skater will diminish to half of what she was. As the weight begins to drop, the sparkle in their eyes vanish along with it. The zest, the enthusiasm, disappears with every inch. Before this conversation, I noticed her jacket was becoming baggy, which was made obvious by her constant fidgeting. Her eyes were sinking. She was numb. She was empty. Her behaviors were only a mirror of my own.
Her Mom found out I was experienced in the fitness industry, and I had a lot of nutrition knowledge-- even though I had only skimmed the surface. I was on my way to understanding myself, and I had started to fancy the idea that I had a problem. From this awareness came my voice, and I was starting to voice my concern. She nodded her head when I talked about how our beliefs and our surroundings in our sport can be damaging. This was a big deal—there’s not a lot of talk about eating disorders and body image. It’s the elephant in the room.
The look of concern on her face struck me. I noticed the worry as it showed up in the creases of her eyes when she looked down. Her eyes cast downward every time she mentioned the weight loss. I could tell she felt helpless, because figure skating did things like applaud for those who shrink. It’s the Catch-22. How can you take back the validation for shrinking? It’s the vicious cycle of this mental illness.
She wanted me to help her daughter.
I was not qualified to help. I drove across the Oakland Bridge that night not being able to drop the conversation from my memory—because all I wanted to do was help. While I was still suffering myself, I wanted to do whatever I could to prevent anyone else from going through the same thing.
Chills rushed down my spine in the same way the words “you could win Nationals” did. On that drive home that evening as I made my way towards the city lights, a little voice inside my head said,
“This pain is your purpose.”
And I’ll tell ya, I’m only getting started.