Leave the sport, gain an eating disorder - Health & Fitness ...

LOS ANGELES -- Alyssa Kitasoe studied herself in the mirror, and the image was shocking.

She had been standing near the bathroom sink, vomiting into a plastic container. When she looked up, through eyes blurred with tears, she was disgusted by what she saw.

?It was like seeing a ghost of yourself, or a monster,? Kitasoe recalled. ?I remember just staring at myself.?

A year earlier, Kitasoe viewed herself very differently. A striking young woman with long black hair and a radiant smile, she was strong and proud -- the UCLA gymnastics logo on her clothes providing instant respect around campus. She even felt confident wearing a tiny leotard in front of the piercing eyes of judges during her routines.

That all changed when she quit her sport. Since the age of 7 she had devoted her life to gymnastics, and without it she felt a loss of identity.

She tried coaching as an undergraduate assistant, but shuffling mats and floorboards didn?t fill the void.

So she developed a new fixation.

Her body.

Since she was no longer working out 25 hours a week, the pounds crept onto what had been her fit 5-foot-1, 115-pound frame -- a frightening prospect for a girl who for nearly 10 years had endured weekly weigh-ins.

?You still have the mind-set that you need to be tiny,? said Kitasoe, now 24 and four years removed from the most dramatic of her struggles. ?You compare yourself to the way you were.?

It was the start of a destructive cycle.

As soon as she awoke each morning, her thoughts were consumed by food. But she resisted eating until the evening, when she would gorge, at times devouring an entire pizza and large bag of chips.

Then, overcome with guilt, she?d induce vomiting.

She knew she was hurting her body, but she didn?t care.

?If someone would have told me if I did it one more time I would die,? Kitasoe said, ?I don?t think that would have stopped me.?

It?s a common problem. At least one-third of female college athletes have some type of eating disorder, according to studies published in 1999 and 2002 by experts Craig Johnson and Katherine Beals, who together examined nearly 1,000 female student-athletes participating in various sports.

As Kitasoe knows, the struggle doesn?t conclude at the end of an athletic career. Sometimes, that?s where it starts.

?There?s a competitive drive in that successful personality that?s going to manifest itself somewhere,? said Becci Twombley, director of sports nutrition at UCLA. ?Eating fixations can happen.?

Source: http://www.sunherald.com/2011/08/10/3340483/leave-the-sport-gain-an-eating.html

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