Through all my life, the sport I did was wrestling. I did it as a kid in elementary school where I was very skinny and didn’t weigh much and I did it in high school where I was not the size or weight that I wanted to be. Weight has always been sort of an issue for me because of how I would see myself and compare me to the people around me like my brother who has a similar body type but is skinnier and more athletic or my best friend who might be shorter but is far more athletic. I went from skinny in elementary school, to heavier in middle and start of high school and then back to skinny and then back to heavy where now it’s sort of in the middle. Wrestling is an amazing sport and an amazing way to get in shape but it is also the easiest way to get an eating disorder. When the main focus of a sport is to be as low of a weight you can to get the best chance at winning, even if the coaches tell you not to, you try to lose a lot of weight and that’s what I did. In two years of doing the sport in high school, I went from about 185 to 160 to 170 and then all the way down to 150 and I know for a fact that I did not do it in a healthy way.

Now the reason why I went through these fluctuations was not just because of the demand of the sport but the culture and the people around me. I’ve once seen a person whose weight class is 113 get called fat for eating lunch and that’s just the norm. And with personally experiencing this culture, I became very accustomed to it. I would laugh along, make jokes to other people and even start joking about it with my friends outside of wrestling but inside, it just hurt. I truly lost my appetite. During that time, I lost myself in the culture. I wouldn’t eat for extended periods of time, I would over work myself and then I would eat as much food as I could in this constant cycle where I lost my love for food. I had conditioned my stomach and myself to not need the food anymore and it truly was my brain telling my body that we needed this. Until finally senior year, I was just done. The impact of the sport and the culture on my body was too much so I felt that to make a union between my body and my mind, I had to take a step back. And even though sometimes I may still focus on my weight and I may still have these feelings in the back of my head, I still keep trying and that’s all that matters.