cheekygirl's Journal

wow, i haven't written a journal for a while. i really should do it more often, although lately i have been preocupied with, well, my usual struggles. but here goes.......

i just finished watching a very heartbreaking movie about a gymnast who develops an eating disorder. i had to stop watching half way and ball my eyes out because it brought back some very real feelings of those training and competition days. i used to be a gymnast, and although i don't actually remember that much about it(i don't know, maybe i blocked it all out mentally), the movie really brought back the intense feelings of anxiety. no wonder i had/have an eating disorder. when i was a gymnast, i learned to eat away the stress and anxiety when i got home from training each night--to the point where i couldn't walk comfortably. but i couldn't eat much before training because i would feel sick from all the conditioning we had to do and i hated that. this really developed after one day at school i got food poisoning and threw up in front of my whole english class. after this incident, i couldn't eat at school and i found it difficult to eat before any social event or going out of the house. so a very vicious cycle developed; eating almost nothing all day, then eating an apple, orange and a museli bar before training, then bingeing so badly at night after returning home from training. 

after experiencing the fluster of emotion while watching this movie, i realised that doing gymnastics greatly influenced the development of my ED. i did wonder about how my sister, an ex-gymnast, didn't develop an actual ED, but i realised that i had the personality as well as the influence of the sport, that really 'switched' the ED on. i feel really relieved that i figured this out