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Despite the fact that I was, you know, I had a really great life, I had two children, I had a really good job, I was very successful, I really struggled and suffered with some of the abuses in the sport, the emotional and the physical abuse. I just had terribly low self-esteem and high anxiety and all the, I had nightmares about gymnastics still like I had these

nightmares I wake up in a cold sweat about you know being weighed in and having my

weight announced on the loudspeaker and then being forced to be publicly shamed with two hours of

extra conditioning because I gained a quarter pound.

This is not an exaggeration, this is exactly what happened when I was training and so I just I presented it as this very normal well

adjusted person but I had all these you know demons I guess and I wanted to kind

of make sense of it and get through it I didn't want to live my life that way so I sat down and wrote a book about it and get through it. I didn't want to live my life that way. So I sat down and wrote a book about it and came to understand quite a bit about myself and what I had experienced. Because you're trained in the sport if you struggle or suffer from this treatment, is abusive I trained on an ankle a broken

ankle for two years I was denied food I lived on 300 calories a day or weight

well a loudspeaker how can anyone perform that way? I don't think I knew that. That's insane.

That's a bar of chocolate.

Fear is adrenaline and you're terrified of your coach. I would cut an apple into like

eight pieces and I would eat one every two

hours or something like that. And this is how it was and the aesthetic of the sport was

very skinny then, it's less so now. But I would wake up in a cold sweat and I just didn't want to live that way anymore. You know, I didn't want to hate myself. And so I sat down and wrote this book and tried to make sense of it. And I promised myself to be as honest as possible, even if it was unflattering in it's in the portrayal of me

and I was our writer I'd never really written anything but I was an avid reader and I thought well if I can

you know give people a peek inside this world and write competently maybe I can get this

published and I did and it really this is before the me too movement had taken hold you were not

...