For my whole childhood and adolescence, I was a multi-sport athlete. Along with numerous school sports, I was a competitive gymnast for years. Growing up in a physically demanding sport allowed me to learn bodily discipline; however, it has become a challenge for me to be okay with my changing body.
My training gym was very body positive: the coaches did not use harmful words to describe our physique, they encouraged strength and agility, but I never heard a lick of body shaming. This does not mean it didn’t affect how I see myself. I conditioned my body to be the ideal gymnast silhouette. I was strong and flexible, and often received compliments on how I looked.
Even though those remarks were not negative, they still stick with me today, six years out of my beloved sport.
After leaving gymnastics due to recurring injuries, I became a gym rat because that was the only way to fulfill the time I was used to spending pushing my body to extreme physical limits. That lasted up until university, where I was met with heightened workloads and intense anxiety and depression.
I stopped being a regular at the gym. My energy was no longer being spent on filling the gymnastics void with weightlifting, and now I only do infrequent home workouts.
This is not normal for me. This does not match the physical discipline I grew up with.
I am now 20 years old—a woman. I no longer have sculpted muscles, just leftover fragments of what my athletic body used to be. My body has matured, and I no longer have that ideal gymnast silhouette. But I still hear those words in my head, “Wow, I wish I had abs like yours,” or “Oh my god, look at your legs.”
I think about all the feedback I received as a child and the extreme amount of time spent exerting my body in every which way to have the muscles which only faintly remain today.
I look at myself in the mirror now and criticize my body. I look at myself in the mirror and wish I still looked how I did as a child. I know I am not the same, but I still wish. I have hips now, I am a woman, not a child. My once rock-hard abs are now merely faintly toned. I now see my once impressive obliques as “just fat.” My back is no longer as muscular as I am used to, and my legs don’t visually satisfy me anymore.
I am hard on myself, and I sometimes cry about the ideal gymnast body I have lost. This is body dysmorphia as a retired athlete.
There are a million ways I try to explain to myself that I am not meant to look the same as I did before. The same as I did when I was a 20-hour-a-week training gymnast. I know in my heart that I will never look like that again, and it is hard.
But I am no longer a child. I am a woman, and every day I learn to accept the body I am in. I only have one body, and it does not look the same as it did 10 years ago, nor will it look the same as it does now in 10 years. I am accepting this, but I still think back to those days.
Even though I may not have heard negative comments about my physique, anything I was ever told about my body still resonates with me today. It is hard to explain how it feels to change like this, but I know other people have either heard positive or negative feedback in a competitive sport, who resonate with body dysmorphia as a retired athlete.