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The Skinny Struggle: Kimiko Hirai Soldati on Body Image
Diving, Olympian, U.S. national champion, NCAA champion
Who knows when you start thinking about what your body looks like? Probably when you are very young. I remember my thoughts about my body starting to get distorted when I was 14 or 15. Before I was a diver, I was a gymnast. My coach wanted me to stay small. It was so confusing. I was becoming a woman, and he was trying to pressure me to remain a skinny, little girl.
Everything got worse in high school. I began to feel uncomfortable and embarrassed about how strong my body looked. In diving, you are judged for your performance and how you look.My diving coach was no better than my gymnastics coach. “Don’t get fat,” he’d say to us. How I felt about myself became totally wrapped up in how I saw my body.
I started eating lots and then throwing it all up. I thought I could control it, but it ended up controlling me. It didn’t help that everyone was telling me how good I looked. The more weight I lost, the worse things were. It was a secret, nasty cycle of feeling bad, eating, puking, and feeling bad again. For a year and a half, I couldn’t stop it. I was never happy. It took all the energy out of me. My diving performance started to suffer big time. Finally, my roommates called me out on it. I had to admit that I had a serious problem. I joined a program for people with eating disorders at a hospital; there, we spent a lot of time talking about what we were going through. I learned that my problem was much more about my feelings about myself than about eating. I admit that I always want things to be perfect.
I didn’t understand where to draw the line between healthy and unhealthy eating and thinking. It’s easy to say, “Accept your body,” but it’s sometimes tough to actually do it. I wish that I had taken better care of myself during my teenage years. Who knows what will happen to my body because of how I abused it? I might get brittle bones, bad teeth or a damaged heart. But honestly, I was lucky. There were people who cared enough to get me help. I got healthy again. I went on to win the NCAA college diving championship. Now food is my friend, not my enemy. It is fuel for my machine – a machine that I will take very good care of from now on.
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