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People Articles-Athletes

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People Articles - Athletes

 

 

Return to Athletes with ED Histories page.

 

 


 


 

Cathy Rigby (8/13/84)

 

A onetime Olympic gymnast overcomes the bulimia that threatened her life. (1984, August 13). People.

 

 

Before Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci there was Cathy Rigby. The first of the gymnast media darlings, the 4'11", 93-pound pixie came to public attention at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, where she placed 16th. At the 1970 world gymnastic championships in Yugoslavia she won the silver medal, a first for an American woman in international competition. She competed again in 1972 in Munich, placing 10th. After retiring in 1972, at 19, Rigby parlayed her expertise into a career doing sports commentary and commercials. But the sport in which she had thrived since the age of 10 had a dire lingering effect on her. Desperate to maintain an "ideal" weight of 89 pounds, Rigby developed bulimia, the so-called binge-and-purge syndrome. During her athletic career, and for years after, she would consume large amounts of food and then force herself to throw up. It wasn't until three years ago, With the help of a psychiatrist and her second husband, actor Tom McCoy, 28, that she was able to overcome her problem.

 

Born in Long Beach, Calif. Cathy is the daughter of a retired materials analyst and her engineer husband, who are now divorced. At 31, the former gymnast has three children of her own. Sons Buck, 8, and Ryan, 4, are from her marriage to former NFL running back Tommy Mason; daughter Theresa, 20 months, is her child by McCoy, with whom she co-starred in a road show of Neil Simon's They're Playing Our Song. She hosts Alive & Well, a fitness program on Cable's USA Network, and is currently ABC's expert commentator on gymnastics at the Olympics.

 

Cathy believes it was her compulsiveness and lack of self-confidence that led to her problem. She met with correspondent Susan Champlin at her home in Fullerton, Calif. to talk about her battle against the disease that affects more than a million Americans.

 

I wasn't concerned about my weight until I went to an Olympic training camp when I was 15. I weighed 93 pounds and they wanted me to get down to 89, but even though I was training eight hours a day I couldn't lose. I was just obsessed with trying to be the perfect team member, and if it meant getting down to 89 pounds, by God, I was going to do it.

 

One night the team went out for pizza, and I ate two or three pieces. I was going to get weighed in the morning and I was frantic. A friend said, "Well, just stick your finger down your throat." I thought, "That's the most repulsive thing I could do," but I tried it. I tried again and again until I had broken blood vessels in my eyes, but I couldn't get rid of the food. The next morning I weighed a pound over, so I went back to the starvation routine.

 

The Olympics were a month later and everything was fine. I made a big hit and the media covered it. Then came puberty. When I turned 16 I went up to 105 pounds, even though I was just eating what normal high school kids eat--a sandwich and chips for lunch and a meat-and-potatoes dinner. My coach was on me--my father too--to get my weight down.

 

In the summer of 1969 I went to Europe on a tour with my coach's gymnastics team, and I spent three horrible days fasting. I got back down to 95 and swore I would never gain weight again. When I got home I worked on perfecting the art of throwing up. Eventually it just became an extension of eating, and I did it an average of six times a day. The binging and purging lasted through the '72 Olympics. I remember at times being faint during training, but I thought it was no big deal. My coach found out what I was doing. A lot of girls were this way, and he saw all of us eating a lot and then going into the bathroom. I remember him saying, "You're going to pay later if you keep doing this." My family also knew what was going on by then, but i wouldn't listen to them either. I was under a lot of pressure going into the '72 Games and I didn't want to worry about dieting.

 

The trouble really started after I got out of gymnastics, because I no longer had a goal and all I was doing was eating and throwing up. Everybody thought I had the most successful life: I had a career working with ABC Sports, i was doing TV movies (like The Great Wallendas) and commercials, and the money was coming in--about $300,000 a year. It was a dreamworld.

 

In the nine years we were married Tommy and I never had an argument. I would never complain or say no--I wanted to be perfect in my attitude and in my weight. Inside I was going crazy. I probably consumed 10,000 calories a day or more in fast foods. I took a voice lesson every week and I can tell you where every McDonald's and Jack-in-the-Box was along the way-- and every bathroom where I could get rid of the food.

 

One day in 1973 Tommy stood outside the bathroom door and heard me throwing up. At first he was very upset, then he just kind of ignored it. When he said anything about it I would hide it by running the water or turning on the shower. That was our life. We didn't communicate.

 

I got pregnant with my oldest son, Bucky, in 1975, and I gained only 11 pounds. It was a time when not gaining weight was really in. The doctor said, "Boy, Cathy, you're doing a great job." And I was very proud of myself. But Bucky weighed only five pounds six ounces at birth, and I lost all my milk because I had no body fat. I nursed him for a month at most. During that time I wasn't eating anything and I lost even more weight--I went down to 82.

 

People around me got very nervous. My mother was worried, and friends would say, "Cathy, you look terrible!" I finally went back up to 89 and stayed there until 1979. I thought I looked great but in reality I looked awful. I was always tired and cold and I just wanted to lie around all the time.

 

I remember one day after Bucky was born I was sitting on the floor, crying. I had just eaten and thrown up, and I looked in the Yellow Pages and called this doctor. I told him I was scared to death--my husband was gone a lot, I had this little baby and a problem. I was a public figure and I didn't know where to go or what to do. But he didn't do anything for me because he had no knowledge of how to treat bulimia.

 

Tommy and I wanted another baby but I could not get pregnant. I kept trying, which was another pressure. After four years I took Clomid, a fertility drug, and got pregnant, but I was still bulimic. In my fourth month my electrolyte balance went haywire. When that happens your heart flutters, you perspire, you're twitchy and your hands shake. I went to the hospital but I didn't tell them I was bulimic. They thought I was just under a lot of stress, and they gave me an IV and filled me with minerals and fluids.

 

After that I thought, "I'm never going to do this again. It's not worth hurting my baby for." I tried to eat a balanced diet and I ended up gaining 25 pounds. I nursed Ryan for four months, but right after that I went back to bulimia. I wasn't meeting my children's emotional needs because food was my first priority and I felt very guilty, which just made me want to eat more.

 

It was a very simple thing that really turned my life around. I had been working on singing and acting for 10 years, and in 1981 I got the chance to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I had to sing in front of an audience for the first time and I was terrified. But I got great reviews and my self-confidence soared. All of a sudden I didn't need this crutch, the bulimia. I finally realized that I had always let others--a father, a coach, a judge--determine how I felt. If I got a good score and was skinny, I was good. If I didn't, I was bad. I also realized that it was time to get out of the marriage and start doing what was important to me.

 

Tom, my second husband, came into the picture a few months after the breakup. (We'd met during The Wizard of Oz; he was in the ensemble.) We fell in love immediately. One day he asked me if I was bulimic. I just cried. I said, "Yes, and I don't know what to do about it." He said, "We'll take it slowly and get help."

 

Tom was very supportive. He never bothered me if I felt the need to eat something and get rid of it--we just talked about it afterward. Vanity also played a role. He said, "You circles under your eyes, your hair is falling out and you look older." For the first time I listened to somebody.

 

In 1981 I went to a psychiatrist who specialized in eating disorders. I went on and off for about a year. Basically we would just talk. I learned that although I had let other people make all my decisions for me. I felt resentful about it. The bulimia was a kind of rebellion. It was the one way I could be in control. The more I took control of other areas of my life, the less I needed the bulimia.

 

When you're used to throwing up water because you're afraid you're going to gain weight, putting anything in your stomach is frightening. It was a slow recovery process, but once you start understanding why you do something, it's easier. You don't just stop the obsession immediately--sometimes you go back to your old habits. But when I did, I didn't let it get to me. I would just think, "Okay, I did it that time, now let's get back on track." The hardest thing to get over is accepting that gaining two or three pounds is not bad. I remember how scared I was to get over 94. It's not really the eating that's the problem; it's the emotional side. After that it's all behavior modification: Instead of reaching for three burgers at Mc Donald's, I'd eat something like a salad that wasn't so fattening, and I wouldn't feel the need to get rid of it.

 

For the last three years I've been all right--I just can't believe I don't want to eat all the time. Tom and I got married in 1982. When I became pregnant with Theresa I gained 28 pounds, which I never would have thought I could do. Now it's not a big deal to sit down and eat. Not that there aren't times (like holidays) when I would like to stuff, but there is no longer the need to constantly eat and throw up. I weigh 100 pounds and there are times when my stomach gets a little pouchy, but it doesn't panic me.

 

I am driven sometimes. That's why I went so far with my gymnastics. But when it comes to eating--and everything else--i have to remember to take things in moderation.

 


 

Cathy Rigby (5/6/91)

 

Goodman, M., & Kahn, T. (1991, May 6). Stage: Cathy Rigby, flying high. People, 107+.

 

 

All grown up, with bulimia behind her, the former gymnast soars in Peter Pan

 

AS LEGEND HAS IT, THE LATE, GREAT Mary Martin, after a particularly grueling Broadway performance of Peter Pan, collapsed on her dressing-room sofa and groaned, "You have to be an acrobat to play this part."

 

Enter flying Cathy Rigby, the onetime Olympic gymnast now following in the elfin footsteps of Martin and Sandy Duncan as the stage's favorite airborne trouper.

 

Rigby, 38 and a mother of four, has won rave reviews for her performance since she took to the air in the touring show in 1989. ("For sure," declared the Boston Globe's demanding Kevin Kelly, "[Peter Pan author] J.M. Barrie's fairy dust has not been wasted.")

 

Rigby, who has performed in 47 cities so far, revels in her aerial role. "Flying is such a joy," says the former balance-beam ace. "You just want to hoot."

 

Between flights, there are other activities to get her hollering: The cast has held backstage Easter-egg hunts and water-gun fights and in March staged a '50s-style prom night for Rigby at a Buffalo hotel. "In high school I never went to the prom because I was too consumed with gymnastics," she explains. "Also, with my hair in pigtails and looking about 10, I wasn't exactly date material."

 

It may well be that Rigby so enjoys playing the boy who won't ever grow up! because, like so many child athletes, she was never allowed to do so. In fact, Rigby's life reads like a checklist of road-to-stardom perils: There was the overbearing coach, the alcoholic father, the unfulfilled athletic expectations, bulimia and divorce.

 

Born in Los Alamitos, Calif., Rigby was a sickly child, fiercely protected by her father, an engineer for McDonnell Douglas, and her mother, a materials analyst. Preternaturally shy, Rigby nonetheless leaped into gymnastics after her first back flip on a trampoline. A coach in nearby Long Beach, Bud Marquette, took her under his wing, and her father built her a balance beam and a set of uneven bars in the backyard.

 

Dad and coach soon collided. "It became a power struggle," Rigby remembers, "and I was torn between the two." Her father, Paul, lost his job when Cathy was 15. Though he later quit drinking, Rigby says life "was hell for a long time.

 

"Gymnastics was a way to be away from home, but it too had its problems." The major one was the media-hyped expectation that she would win a gold medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Instead, Rigby finished 10th overall, and her star was lost in the trail blazed across the sky by Olga Korbut. "I began to think, 'Did I fail everyone?'" Rigby recalls. "And when you're scared to death like that, you put a veil across everything. Pretty soon you just become an image of what you think you should be."

 

One of the things Rigby thought she should be was very, very thin. At 16, her weight jumped from 95 lbs. to 105 lbs., which made her feel, she says, that "my identity was threatened."

 

Bulimia was the next step. A fellow gymnast showed her the routine, and Rigby followed it faithfully. Her weight dropped to 79 lbs., and twice she was hospitalized and nearly died from electrolyte imbalance.

 

Superficially, Rigby's life seemed perfectly normal. In 1973 she married Tommy Mason, a running back for the Los Angeles Rams. She eventually became a commentator for ABC Sports and gave birth to two sons, Buck, now 15, and Ryan, 10. (Her husband knew about her bulimia, Rigby says, but chose to ignore it. The illness so disturbed her body that she had to take fertility pills to get pregnant.)

 

She even landed a stage role, playing, yes, Peter Pan in a seven- month national tour. The songs were prerecorded, though; Rigby just acted and flew. A fellow actor suggested she take singing and acting lessons, which she did.

 

"At first," she says, "I could sing on key, but I had a very, light, puffy voice. Having started from scratch in gymnastics, I knew I could get better if I just worked at it. It's that athlete's obsessiveness -- the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it's what helped me do well in the theater."

 

But as she raised her boys and pursued her career, the bulimia and a failing marriage conspired to wear her down. In 1981 she met Tom McCoy, an actor who was appearing with her in The Wizard of Oz in Sacramento and who helped her through her divorce.

 

"We had everything in common," Rigby says, "a sense of family -- he was wonderful with the boys -- not to mention that he was the most handsome guy out there." They married a year later, and McCoy convinced his bride to fight her bulimia.

 

She began seeing a psychiatrist and soon was giving speeches to people with similar disorders. With Tom as watchdog, she has maintained healthy eating habits for seven years. Now, she says, "I'm most comfortable at 105 lbs. If at one time you would have told me I weighed that, I would have felt desperate."

 

She and Tom have two children of their own these days, daughters Theresa, 8, and Kaitlin, 5, and have a Spanish-style home in Fullerton, Calif., near Anaheim.

 

McCoy, 34, began producing soon after he and Rigby married. Two years ago they decided to mount their own production of Peter Pan; since then, wherever Peter flies is home.

 

When this production closes in August, Rigby would like to tackle Joan of Arc. "I find many similarities between Saint Joan and Peter Pan," she says, "especially in the intensity of their convictions."

 

Rigby manages to maintain a reasonably stable home and road life. Her boys, who live most of the year with their father in Anaheim Hills, join her regularly on the tour, and the girls happily travel with her from town to town.

 

Rigby realizes this presents new pitfalls for Mom to negotiate: Little Kaitlin was confused when she first saw her perform. Says Rigby: "She went through all kinds of stages, like saying, 'Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a boy just like you,' to learning every single line in the play." Rigby sees to it that the girls are tutored daily at the theater. In addition, Theresa, a budding songbird, tunes up with her mother for 45 minutes each day.

 

Still, perplexities remain. "It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality," Rigby says. "After they see me sing, 'I'll never grow up/ I don't wanna go to school,' how are you going to say, two minutes later, 'Okay, kids, it's time to brush your teeth and do your homework'?"

 


 

Gelsey Kirkland (1/12/87)

 

Aitken, L. (1987, January 12). Dancing on my grave by Gelsey Kirkland with Greg Lawrence [Book review]. People

 

 

DANCING ON MY GRAVE by Gelsey Kirkland with Greg Lawrence

 

Ballet can be a fiendish vocation -- a ritual of self-abasement to impossible standards of beauty and physical skill. But by the third chapter of this erratically intriguing book, it should be clear that if the tyranny of a George Balanchine had not existed, young Gelsey would have invented it. Her own tendency to compulsive behavior -- a by-product, she suggests, of a father's messy slide into alcoholic ruin -- was evident long before Gelsey, 8, following her older sister Johnna, first submitted herself to the brutal rigors of the School of American Ballet. (Johnna is now a rug designer in Los Angeles.)

 

What would ultimately prove so dangerous to Gelsey, who pushed herself into a cocaine-besotted breakdown by 28, is that the peculiar manias of the ballet are such a hospitable environment for self-abusive behavior. In Kirkland's case, she succumbed to the emphasis on a superthin body type that makes eating disorders so common among dancers. Later she had silicon implants put in her breasts, had her earlobes clipped and had her lips enlarged. Meanwhile, the stagey romanticism of the dance lured the young star -- who was 17 when she became a soloist with the New York City Ballet -- into a series of volatile affairs with her partners: Peter Martins, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Patrick Bissell.

 

Kirkland's ungenerous assessments of their conduct, in and out of bed, have generated a lot of comment. In fact, this is essentially a book about ballet, and about Kirkland's own demons, artistic and otherwise. Anyone indifferent to, say, the technical and intellectual challenges of interpreting Giselle may flag well before Misha plays the cad or little Gelsey takes her trip through the seven circles of chemical hell. (Doubleday, $17.95) -- Lee Aitken

 


 

William "The Refrigerator" Perry (8/8/88)

 

Grin and bear it. (1988, August 8). People

 

 

-- Grin and Bear It: William "the Refrigerator" Perry reported to the Chicago Bears training camp on July 21 weighing 358 lbs., which was 38 more than coach Mike Ditka had requested. Perry was placed on the team's non-injury reserve list and enrolled in an eating disorders program.

 


 

Carling Bassett (4/27/92)

 

Neill, M., & Sider, D. (1992, April 27). Sequel: After a three-year bout with bulimia, Carling Bassett cherishes her family and tries for a tennis comeback. People, pp. 97.

 

 

ON THE REBOUND

 

 

THE MATCH HAD GONE BADLY FOR CARling Bassett-Seguso. She had been blown off the court in straight sets by 21-year-old Kimiko Date of Japan in the Virginia Slims of Florida in Boca Raton last month. But for the onetime teen ace of tennis, it was a day of bittersweet triumph. At 24, she was starting over. In March 1985 "Darling Carling," as she was called, was ranked No. 8 in the world and seemed destined to claim Chris Evert's title as America's tennis sweetheart.

 

The following year the champagne-blond daughter of one of Canada's richest couples (on her mother's side, Carling's ale; on her father's, sports franchises, a newspaper and a TV station) began to branch out.

 

She did some work as an Eileen Ford model and got her own line of JC Penney sportswear. Inexplicably, however, her tennis game came unstrung. Bassett's ranking started tailing off in mid-'85, and by 1989, when she left the tour, it had fizzled to No. 158.

 

Marriage and the birth of her first child had slowed her down, but the central reason for her decline remained, until now, a secret to all but her closest friends and family. Carling Bassett had become a victim of bulimia. "At 15, I wasn't heavy by any means," she says, "but I gained a lot of weight; I went from 111 to 126. At 14, 15, 16, your body starts to mature, you start to put on puppy fat. You want to look good all the time. You start feeling pressure."

 

Bassett had been on the tour six months when another player, an older woman whom she will not identify, showed the 16-year-old how to put her fingers down her throat and instantly get rid of all those calories. Soon, she says, the habit had taken her captive. "It becomes part of your life, like smoking," says Bassett. "Or it's like being an alcoholic. It's so easy to get into and so hard to get out of. I hated myself that I couldn't stop."

 

Although Carling maintains that she was keeping her weight up during her illness, her mother, Susan Bassett-Klauber, remembers otherwise: "She became skeletal. You'd try to force food on her, and she'd just throw up. We screamed and yelled."

 

Carling kept her disorder hidden from members of the tour and even from Robert Seguso, a six-time Davis Cup doubles player whom she married in September 1987. She did, however, give him reason to suspect that all was not well. One evening earlier in the year, the two were out dancing at a club in Boca Raton near their present home. Bassett remembers having two beers and one puff of marijuana. "I started flipping out," she says. "I couldn't feel my hands. I couldn't feel my arms. Robert took me outside, and I started hyperventilating. He took me to the hospital. I thought I was going to die, my metabolism was so screwed up."

 

"I really didn't understand it at all," says Seguso, now a businessman involved in developing a multi-sports training center in Florida. "I was so immature, I really didn't know anything." At the hospital Bassett was treated with Valium for her panic attack and released. The close call was not lost on her. "It takes something like that to scare you," she says. With the help of her husband, to whom she revealed her bulimia that evening, she started to fight back against her affliction. "I never even went to a doctor," she says. "I came out and said, 'I have to stop this.'

 

But you can't recover if you're alone. I never let myself be alone. It was the hardest fight of my life."

 

Says Robert: "I helped as much as I could. I was by her side the whole time. But it was her. She pretty well turned herself around."

 

She was helped, no doubt, by her first pregnancy, with her son, Holden, born in March 1988, and the need to provide not only for herself but also for her baby. She sailed through the pregnancy without morning sickness, but she wasn't so lucky while carrying Carling, her daughter, two years later.

 

Throughout much of that pregnancy, she threw up every day. "It was a nightmare," says her mother. "She was in terror. She thought it was a recurrence."

 

Nowadays, says Carling, she has changed radically from the nutrition-ignorant teenager she was. "I've gone to the other extreme," she says. "I've read everything about nutrition. I'm a big believer in fresh vegetables. I know everything that goes on in my body." And what about her tennis comeback? "I'm going to give myself a good test on the tour," says Carling, "not just two or three months."

 

Robert concurs. "She's probably in the best shape and as strong as she's ever been, even when she was eighth in the world," he says. "I think she can definitely get back in the Top 20."

 


 

Ellen Hart Pena (4/10/95)

 

Sellinger, M. B. (1995, April 10). Coping: Hitting her stride. People, 115+.

 

 

A runner goes the distance, beating anorexia and bulimia.

 

Not so long ago, Ellen Hart Pena had gone the distance as a world-class runner. She placed third in the 10,000-meter exhibition event at the 1980 U.S. Olympic trials, and two years later, she set an American women's record in the 30- kilometer run. But privately Pena was waging a different and more desperate race--struggling against anorexia and bulimia and trying to outrun an image of herself as a failure. "I used my body as a battleground," she says. "Food was my weapon."

 

For more than 10 years--from her senior year at Harvard through the remainder of her athletic career, law school, her work as a lawyer and her 1988 marriage to then Denver mayor Federico Pena, now Secretary of Transportation, the Albuquerque native warred with her demons. Like an estimated 1 million other Americans who suffer from anorexia and bulimia, most of them women, she veered between starvation diets and bingeing and purging. Through it all, the 5'5" Pena managed to keep her weight at 110 lbs. and keep the severity of her illness a secret from nearly everyone, including her husband, 48. "Once I understood how serious the problem was," he says, "I had to ask myself, `Gosh, why didn't I appreciate it earlier?'"

 

It wasn't until 1990, when illness threatened the birth of her first child, that Pena finally broke free--an achievement she credits largely to years of psychotherapy. Now a full-time mother to daughters Nellia, 4, and Cristina, 3, Pena, 36, talked about her trials with correspondent Margie Bonnett Sellinger at her Alexandria, Va., home.

 

I remember exactly the moment it began. It was January 1980, during my senior year at Harvard where I ran on the track team. My coach had suggested that I lose some weight over Christmas break to help me run faster, and I had worked out every day and gone from 132 to 123 pounds But when I came back from vacation I had a really crummy workout, and the coach said it looked as if I were gaining back the weight.

 

That was the click. If he'd made the same comment to me a year earlier it probably wouldn't have had any effect. But I was just four months from graduation and at a point where I was scared about being an adult, about being a woman and going out into the world. Until then, my life had been scripted and safe. Now there were changes happening I couldn't control. I was really hurt by the coach's remark and said to myself, "I'm never, ever going to be fat again."

 

Almost immediately, I began eating very little and spent all my free time running. But then I'd have this uncontrollable, demonic urge to eat ice cream, cookies, doughnuts--anything high-calorie. And I'd eat until I couldn't eat anymore. Afterward, I couldn't bear the thought that it would stay in me and turn into fat, so I'd have to purge. During the worst periods, I'd binge and purge four or five times a day, from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep. By April, I was down to 110, and I looked like a cadaver.

 

The purging was really painful, and it made me feel horrible, disgusting and wretched. I shared a campus dormitory suite with four other women, and when I went into the bathroom I'd lock the door and turn the water on to cover the sound. But my roommates knew. One of them brought me library books on anorexia and persuaded my coach to make me see a counselor. It didn't help. I just sat there until the session was over. My mom found out that spring, and when I visited her in Albuquerque in April she arranged for me to see a family friend who was a psychiatrist. But in my family, people are private. No one was going to hear of my problem and say, "Enough is enough," and plunk me in treatment. Nobody in my family had ever seen a therapist, and when I stopped going after one visit, my mom and one of my sisters, who were the only ones who knew of my problem, didn't push me further. And I was still in denial and didn't think I needed a psychiatrist.

 

When I graduated in June I was very depressed, and it was difficult to be with people. I took a job teaching English and coaching soccer at a private boarding school in Colorado Springs but quit a year later when Nike offered to sponsor me as a runner. For the next four years, I tried to make a go as an amateur athlete, first in Boston, then back in Colorado. My eating improved a bit when I was training because I was happy. But whenever I got injured and couldn't run, I'd fall back into the bingeing and purging several times a day for weeks and months at a time. I was dehydrated, I was cold all the time, my hands would shake, and I would get headaches. And I had horrible nightmares that I would just eat and get bigger like this huge blimp.

 

Most people didn't know I had a problem. In relationships, I would pick men who wouldn't try to get too close to me. And I did a good job of hiding things. No one noticed when I didn't eat--I'd take just a couple bites of what was on my plate and then mound it up all together so it didn't look like much. The bingeing and purging I'd do behind closed doors. But I was trying everything to control my problem. I learned to meditate, I prayed, I went to group and individual therapy and Overeaters Anonymous meetings. Either the techniques weren't right for me or I wasn't ready for them.

 

Sometimes I was actually sorry that the eating disorder wouldn't kill me, and I'd think, "Please, just let me out of this."

 

In February 1984, I met Federico at a race in Denver. I placed first among the women and, as mayor, he presented me with the award. I thought he was very down-to-earth and genuine, and we seemed to hit it off. But I couldn't imagine that anyone could like me if they knew about this horrible part of my life. When we started dating, I told him I had an eating problem and was working on it, but I made sure he didn't find out how bad it was. Hiding it was actually pretty easy. Federico was working at least 15 hours a day, and after I started law school at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the fall of 1985 we couldn't spend that much time together. Several months later I found a therapist who specialized in eating disorders, but I didn't begin to make progress until I started with yet another therapist in 1987. She helped me see how my eating was connected to my perfectionism and my need for control. I remember in grade school going into the bathroom and crying whenever my team lost because I felt I hadn't done enough to make us win. As the second oldest of eight children, I had been a caretaker growing up so I also didn't know how to ask for help. I felt like a failure acknowledging that I wasn't all that strong or capable, and I had been trying to escape those negative feelings by bingeing and purging. But as I began to deal with my fears, my confidence grew. I really believed I could get better, so when Federico proposed in 1987, I said yes.

 

We married in May 1988. I graduated law school the same month and took a job with a prestigious firm in Denver. Then the following October I learned I was pregnant. I never told Federico the full extent of my eating disorder, and now I didn't tell my obstetrician. For a while I was good about my eating, but before long I was bingeing and purging. Then, six months into my pregnancy, I began to have really significant contractions. That was the moment when I said, "Stop. You have to take care of your body, and your body is now carrying a baby." I'm absolutely convinced that if I hadn't been in therapy for a long time, I wouldn't have been able to turn the corner.

 

It wasn't easy. I would eat and feel so bloated, and then the old feelings would kick in--eating equals fat equals bad. Keeping in touch with my therapist in Boulder, I just had to take a leap of faith that it was really going to turn out okay. Amazingly I'm still okay. Through Nellia's birth that July and Cristina's birth 19 months later and all the stress of moving to Washington in 1993, my eating problem has not resurfaced. Even when I suffered a miscarriage that July, I knew I was strong enough to withstand the pain. I don't think the lost pregnancy was as real to Federico as it was to me, but when he asked me if I wanted to go back into therapy to help work through my sadness, I told him I had the tools now to deal with pain myself.

 

Although Federico had attended a few therapy sessions with me, we never had the 3-hour, tearful kind of talk about my illness you might expect because I was too afraid to reveal the depths of my disease. In fact, I don't think he truly understood how bad it was until last fall when I showed him an article I'd written for the Road Runners Club of America newsletter. I think he felt bad that he hadn't understood. My response was that he had done all I had allowed him to do, which was basically to stand by me.

 

I'm running and even competing again, but for the first time I can run just for the enjoyment of it. I've also learned to manage my weight, which is now 125, without getting totally compulsive and weird. A couple of months ago I gained four or five pounds, but I just said, "Oh well, I'll have to be more thoughtful about food choices." That felt great. There are still times when I'm tempted to binge and purge, and I think, "Maybe just today..." But I'm strong enough to resist it. I'm not walking near that cliff again because going over the edge was my private hell. I can't go back.

 


 

Heidi Guenther (7/28/97)

 

Hewitt, B., Saveri, G., Baker, K., Stambler, L., Jordan, J., & Day, N. (1997, July 28). Up Front: Last Dance. People, 44+.

 

 

A desperate desire to be slender may have cost 22-year-old ballerina Heidi Guenther her life.

 

Finally the years of plies and dreaming had paid off, and ballerina Heidi Guenther was determined to make the most of it. In May 1996, Guenther, 22, had been promoted from the Boston Ballet's apprentice company, where she had been perfecting her technique for two years, to the main corps de ballet.

 

During Boston's grueling 52 performances of The Nutcracker last Christmas, she performed with remarkable zeal, dancing her own roles and often subbing for other corps members who were sick or injured. By the time the troupe closed its season in May with Cinderella, Guenther was looking noticeably thinner, but not alarmingly so--at least not by ballet standards. "Heidi was a lyrical dancer," says Boston Ballet artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes, "with a lovely sort of refined quality." Adds Boston soloist Kyra Strasberg: "She was a very, very talented dancer with a gorgeous light jump."

 

But at what price, many now ask, was that lightness purchased? For on June 30, while visiting her family in California during the Boston Ballet's summer break, Guenther was traveling with her mother and brother to Disneyland when she suddenly dropped dead from cardiac arrest. At the time of her death, the 5'3" dancer weighed only 93 lbs. Friends and family soon believed that she had been dieting relentlessly to maintain what she thought was a suitable ballet body, which may have caused her heart to stop.

 

Officials at the Boston Ballet denied that they had pushed Guenther too hard, arguing that though they had suggested she lose weight two years ago, they had recently urged her to eat more. But to the dancer's grieving mother, Patti Harrington, those protestations of innocence rang hollow. "The thinner she'd get, the more roles she'd get, the more compliments she'd get," says Harrington, a hotel concierge in San Francisco. "There's a real subliminal message that comes with all that."

 

There is no question that the physical demands and psychological pressures of a top-flight company like the Boston Ballet are at least equal to those of professional sports. "Dancers do feel they could be replaced in a minute," says James Reardon, who danced with the Boston Ballet from 1976 to 1985 and is now the artistic director of his own small company in Cambridge, Mass. "There's always somebody in the wings."

 

Typically, Boston Ballet dancers spend an hour and a half a day in classes, working on technique, then another six hours in rehearsal, learning the steps for the ballets they will be performing during the season, with little more than a lunch hour and occasional five-minute breaks. All sessions are conducted under the watchful--and frequently hypercritical--eyes of the ballet directors. Furthermore, studios are lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, which invite an almost obsessive self-scrutiny. It is a fiercely competitive world in which physical perfection can often seem like the expected norm, rather than an unattainable ideal. "Your body is your instrument," says Reardon.

 

"Dancers are constantly evaluating themselves. 'Do I look good?' 'Do I look bad?' 'How can I look better?'"

 

Those, plainly, were the questions that haunted the days and nights of Heidi Guenther. Yet they hardly deterred her. Born in San Diego, the oldest of three children (her sister, Kirsten, is 20; her brother, Quinton, 15), Guenther began demonstrating her physical gifts almost from infancy. By the time she was 8 months old, she was walking; not long after that, she could climb out of her crib. "She was always into things, climbing on things," says her father, Richard, who separated from Heidi's mother in 1988 and now teaches fifth grade in Los Osos, Calif. At 6, like many little girls, she began taking dance classes. "That's where she just blossomed," Richard says. "She loved dancing."

 

With her mother's strong encouragement and support, she set her sights on becoming a professional dancer. At age 11, she was accepted into a summer program at the Houston Ballet School.

 

From 1987 to 1994, until securing her spot in Boston, she was a scholarship student with the San Francisco Ballet School. "She was so focused and driven to succeed," says Melanie Brown, a close friend and dancing partner in San Francisco. "All she wanted was to be a ballerina."

 

The question of body image first cropped up when she hit puberty and her breasts began to develop.

 

"She didn't like her boobs," says sister Kirsten, a student at the City College of San Francisco. "She didn't want them." That year, according to Patti, the San Francisco Ballet told Guenther to lose weight. "It was just devastating to hear," Patti says. "It was really hard. I felt for her because she felt so bad." Still, after Heidi lost a few pounds, she didn't seem obsessed about her diet. She and her friends would meet almost daily at a local drive-in and eat chicken strips dipped in ranch dressing, which Heidi would wash down with a chocolate shake. "She ate whatever she wanted to eat," says her friend Brown. "She was burning it all off anyway. Yet at that age...we saw a lot of eating disorders."

 

The issue became more urgent several years later, in 1995, after she had completed her debut season with the Boston Ballet's apprentice company. "She had gotten just a little pudgy at that point," says Dierdre Myles, who directs the corps de ballet. Artistic director Holmes suggested to Guenther, who weighed about 115 pounds, that her chances of joining the main corps would improve if she dropped 5. When Guenther returned in August for the next season, Holmes says, she had lost the weight and "looked terrific."

 

A year later she won her promotion to the Boston Ballet. How much the company is responsible for planting the seeds of what seemingly became an eating disorder is open to debate. In an interview with The Boston Globe after learning of Guenther's death, Holmes sounded like an advocate of slimmer-is-better. "You see a girl onstage, her butt going up and down, it's not attractive," she said. But Holmes insists, and a glance at her dancers confirms, that she is actually rather flexible when it comes to body types in her company. "I like diversity," she says. "Our company is not a company of sticks...but you have to have some aesthetic value. People are paying for tickets to see you."

 

Moreover, the Boston Ballet did eventually encourage Guenther to maintain a healthy weight.

 

As whispers began circulating in the company that she was looking thinner than usual, she was asked several times if she was eating properly. In her official evaluation last January, Guenther's dancing was praised, but she was cautioned about her diet. "Be careful not to get too thin," the evaluation read. "We are concerned and hope you are eating well."

 

Guenther signed a statement acknowledging that she had been cautioned. "That's about all we can do," says Holmes, emphasizing that Guenther was an adult and a paid professional. In May, Guenther had a routine physical with a dance-company doctor and a nutritionist, who noted no serious problems.

 

Indeed, her weight was hardly unusual for a young dancer. "She was thin," says Holmes. "But not thin to the point of dying."

 

It is now clear, however, that Guenther had not taken the company's warnings to heart. When Heidi arrived home on June 11, her mother was taken aback at how skinny she looked. "She was thin, too thin, and I said that to her," recalls Harrington. "She said, 'Yeah, I'm going to gain a few pounds.' " Kirsten says that her sister was down to a size 1--"and that looked baggy on her." Harrington was also dismayed to discover that her daughter had started smoking. All the same, Guenther showed no outward signs of an eating disorder. At a barbecue she reluctantly ate just a small piece of steak. But her spirits were good, she seemed to have plenty of energy, and no one caught her throwing up after a meal. "If I had thought there was an eating disorder, I would have acted on it," says Harrington.

 

On June 30, Heidi, her mother and Quinton set out by car for their annual visit to Disneyland. Heidi was laughing and joking much of the way. They stopped to stay overnight with longtime family friends Rosie and Randy Morrison. "She looked much thinner than I had seen her--ever," says Rosie. When she asked Heidi what she weighed she just "blew me off."

 

Around 9 p.m., after a quick run to the convenience store, Patti, Rosie and Heidi were stopped at a gas station in Paso Robles when Heidi suddenly fell backward in the minivan. "No gasp, no cry, no nothing," says her mother. "When I opened the door and she fell out, her eyes were fixed, her lips were blue." Frantic, Patti began screaming, "Heidi, wake up! Heidi, wake up!"

 

Shortly before 10 p.m. she was pronounced dead at a local hospital. A later search of her belongings uncovered a stash of over-the-counter laxatives. She was also taking herbal pills, which she may have been using as a diet aid. Just how her weight loss could have contributed to her death is speculative.

 

An autopsy showed no heart deformities, and tests revealed no unusual substances in her blood. But doctors caution that excessive use of diet aids can, under certain circumstances, lead to cardiac arrest.

 

And the family did have a history of heart trouble.

 

Richard Guenther's father died of heart failure at age 37, and his mother and sister have also suffered attacks.

 

Heidi's father acknowledges that he, for one, tried to encourage his daughter--who never even had time for a serious boyfriend--to live a more rounded life. "I knew she wasn't going to be able to do this forever," he says. "I'd tell her, 'Heidi, you can't put all your eggs in one basket.'" But for the moment, she wouldn't hear such talk. "She was very headstrong, dedicated and focused," he says.

 

As many experts would agree, young women with eating disorders often exhibit an extreme perfectionism, though doctors are wary of predicting which individuals are most at risk. "There's a complex psychological underpinning to eating disorders," says Dr. Michael Strober of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, who treated actress Tracey Gold when she developed anorexia. "The question becomes, why do some people in the face of pressures to control the body's natural form develop these problems," he says, "and others do not."

 

In the aftermath of Heidi's death, her family is hoping to establish a foundation to help young athletes and dancers cope with the pressures of their careers. For now, they are left only with fond memories of a slip of a girl who loved ladybugs, sunflowers and, above all else, dancing. Her father recalls one trip he made with Heidi to Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1992. During a severe thunderstorm it suddenly started to hail. "Ahh, I've never danced in the snow," said Heidi. With the hail pelting down and covering the ground, she ran outside and began dancing a scene from Swan Lake in the street. With each pirouette, says her father, she seemed to become more and more lost in her own fantasy.

 

 

"She was so focused and driven to succeed," says close friend Melanie Brown.

 

"She looked much thinner than I had seen her--ever," says a family friend.

 


 

Dara Torres (9/18/00)

 

Tresniowski, A., & Seibel, D. (2000, September 18). Olympics 2000: She's baaack! Beating bulimia, swimmer Dara Torres unretires at 33 and hungers for gold. People, 201+.

 

 

The meal that changed everything began innocently enough. Two-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Dara Torres--who hadn't swum a single lap in seven happy years of retirement--had tickets to a Meat Loaf concert and was grabbing a quick bite with her boyfriend one night in March 1999. When the talk turned to her former sport, Torres perked right up. "My boyfriend said, 'Every time you talk about swimming you have this gleam in your eye,'" says Torres. "And he said, 'Have you ever thought of making a comeback?'" Torres brushed him off, but at the concert, she recalls, "I couldn't get the thought out of my head."

 

The boyfriend is gone now, but that gleam is still there. After a Rip Van Winkle-like layoff, Torres has indeed made a comeback at the very ripe old age (for a swimmer) of 33, mothballing her modeling career and taking a break from filming those Tae-Bo infomercials to compete in her fourth Olympics--something no American swimmer has done before.

 

Incredibly, Torres swam some of her fastest times ever at the Olympic trials in Indianapolis last month and qualified to go to Sydney with a chance to add to her four medals from the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Olympics. The difference this time is that Torres--who battled bulimia during her first two Games and won all her medals in relay races, not the more glamorous individual events--is totally healthy and gunning for solo gold. "She's always been just a short distance from greatness," says NBC Olympic analyst and two-time swimming gold medalist Donna de Varona. "She never trained the right way or gave 100 percent. I think Dara returned to satisfy unfinished business."

 

That return has not been without controversy: USA Today columnist Christine Brennan speculated that Torres's torrid race times might be due to banned performance-enhancing drugs. The charges "blindsided me," says Torres, who strongly denies them and credits her improbable resurgence--she set a U.S. record in the 50-meter freestyle in June--to a state-of-the-art training routine, rigorous flexibility work and a powerful stroke that 20 lbs. of added muscle has given her. (A 160-lb. six-footer, she bench-presses an impressive 205 lbs.) "She's packed three years of training into one," says her swim coach, Richard Quick.

 

But then, Torres has "been an overachiever all her life," says her mother, Marylu Kauder, 63, a homemaker who taught Dara, her four older brothers and younger sister how to swim in the pool at their Beverly Hills home. (She is divorced from Dara's father, Edward, 82, a real estate broker.) Torres, a quick study, was only 17 when she won gold in the 400-meter relay at the '84 Olympics. Even then, though, she was struggling with bulimia, which she developed trying to keep her weight down for her University of Florida swim meets. "Those were the hardest years of my life," says Torres, who recalls vomiting twice a week. "You hide it, you're totally ashamed, but my parents could see I was really thin."

 

Torres overcame the disorder after several years of therapy but still had a scary moment when she recently put on weight. "I got on a scale and I was 18 lbs. heavier, and just for a second I freaked out," she says. "Then I thought, 'It's okay, it's just muscle,' and I could tell I was really over my problem. Now I eat like a horse."

 

Torres retired after winning gold at the '92 Olympics and insists she never missed the sport. Just the smell of chlorine made her tell a friend, "I am so glad I don't swim." But once Torres decided to hit the pool again, she left her one-bedroom apartment in New York City for temporary digs in Menlo Park, Calif., where for the past 13 months she has been lifting weights and swimming as many as six hours every other day.

 

That kind of commitment can be tough on a social life. "It's not like I can really date right now," says Torres. "I'm in bed by 9:30." But the swimmer has big plans for after Sydney, which she swears will be her final lap. "I want to get my career going again," she explains. "And then I want to get married and start a family." Future boyfriends be advised: When she gets that gleam in her eye, she means business.

 


 

Kathryn Bertine (12/15/03)

 

Waldman, A. (2003, December 15). All the Sundays yet to come: A skater's journey [Book review]. People, 50.

 

 

Picks & Pans: BOOKS: MEMOIR

 

All the Sundays Yet to Come

A Skater's Journey

by Kathryn Bertine

 

REVIEWED BY AMY WALDMAN

 

This memoir of Bertine's brief career as a professional skater is alternately inspiring, funny and alarming. "Of the roughly 250,000 members of the United States Figure Skating Association, 14 skaters make the twice-a-decade [Olympic] games. I was one of the other 249,986," she writes. Bertine's account of touring with Hollywood on Ice--"more like Halloween on Ice," she says, referring to the awful costumes--is a horrifyingly entertaining view of life on the rink.

 

Meanwhile she recounts her personal past, which, like her skating routines, was more difficult than it seemed. Though she grew up in affluent Bronxville, N.Y., she later suffered from anorexia, has an older brother with a bipolar disorder and fell afoul of her mother's drive to make her more feminine. Putting all of these strands in the same story makes for some awkward transitions, but at her best Bertine gets high marks for poise.

 

3/4 stars

 


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