Former UCLA gymnast and team manager Alyssa Kitasoe talks about her eating disorder that started the year after she left the Team.
… 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. …
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. …
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