Being an OIympian puts a lot of pressure on you. Not only are you representing your country and competing against the world's finest athletes, but even after The Olympics are over you are held to a standard that even other professional athletes are not. Shawn Johnson opens up about this pressure in a new video.
TW: this article contains depictions or discussions of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours and may be triggering to some readers.
"When I went on Dancing with the Stars and I had my period for the first time, and I had to deal with going through puberty on national television, I hit a very low spot," Shawn began explaining, which is already stressful enough for a young girl.
Shawn also revealed that waking up after her Olympics performance felt like she had "run into a brick wall," saying, "every decision I made in my life up until that moment, for at least 13 of my 16 years, was based on gymnastics. What it would take and what I needed to do to get to the Olympics."
"Now that the Olympics were over, I didn't know how to function as a normal human being," Shawn continued. "I started doing any and everything I possibly could to lose the weight and to look like I did at the Olympics," she said, revealing she had started taking several kinds of weight loss pills as well as Adderall and ephedrine.
"I went through this dark kind of spiral of a few years on terrible medications and drugs that tried to 'spike my metabolism' and did nothing, I took diuretics, I did every fad diet. I remember I went through a three-week phase where I ate nothing but raw vegetables," Shawn revealed.
"There was something that switched when I got pregnant, where it was no longer about me or my body or like the vanity or like the calories or what I looked like or what I weighed," she said in the video. "I could have cared less. It was about protecting my baby. And I was so excited by that."
We're so glad to hear that! You can watch Shawn's emotional video right here.
