What made you realize that “peer pressure” is a real thing?
The Price of Dedication
My sports coach told me that missing monthly periods and passing out was dedication, so I reported her and had her removed. Months later, she sent her new team after me to ruin my reputation. When I was 14, my mom uprooted our home halfway across the country to Texas.
I was scared of having no friends and becoming the loser you always see getting bullied in those high school movies. So, to combat this, I joined the gymnastics team. I expected the girls to be that beachy stereotype, but they weren’t. They were just pretty girls that everyone else assumed would be really mean.
There was only one nut job on the team, Coach Helen. She always had a whistle in her mouth, never spoke without screaming, and her face always read from anger. On my first day, one of the girls told me that there was a rumor of Helen hitting one of the girls in the past.
I thought it was just dumb gossip. But as more time passed, I understood how the rumor had spread so far because in the span of just a few days, Helen had already called me a fat F whose only purpose is comedic relief. All because I was a little slower than usual since I was on my period.
Whenever she screamed at me, I’d just play some Taylor Swift song in my head and wait for her to finish because there was no way I’d let her insane perfectionism get to me. But my friend Kayla ate up everything Coach Helen said.
When the Clue app said her period was on the way, Kayla refused to eat nothing but lemons and ice cubes for an entire 24 hours because the starvation prolonged it from starting. We could always tell when it was happening. She’d look like some sort of flexible zombie. All the starvation made her so skinny that it was hard to look at her during practice.
But Coach Helen didn’t have that problem. She would come to practice with designer custom leotards and gym bags for her.
“This is what happens when you girls don’t let your biology get you down,” she’d always say, praising Kayla as if she was the golden standard.
She then pinched the thigh of another girl on the team.
“So, while Kayla is going above and beyond, Salma over here can’t even say no to chocolate cake.”
None of us found it funny, but we breathed a laugh because we were so scared of her.
From there, something changed. When we all sat down to eat lunch together, we’d all be eating less and less. One of the girls started bringing in a single Ferrero Rocher as her main meal of the day, and then gulp down a bunch of water to balance it out. People started bragging about how little they were eating, how many periods they had missed.
We all had My Fitness Pal premium and added each other as friends to keep us accountable. And don’t get me wrong, I wanted to please Coach Helen, too. But there was no way I’d walk around looking like I was on the verge of death.
So, I started eating most of my food at home when no one was around and completely cut out dessert from my diet. But one day, as I bit into a slice of bread, all my teammates went extremely silent, like, “Okay, thanks everyone.”. In weeks, our team had gone from preppy, upbeat, and chatty to looking like some sort of cancer support group.
Sometimes after good training sessions, she’d even bring us out to eat. And halfway through, all the girls would disappear to the bathroom. When they came back, there was water in their eyes, and you could see traces of vomit on their clothes.
But this all made Coach Helen even happier. She constantly reminded us of how much better we looked when we were thin, and how much better the movement did, too. Eventually, I actually started to believe that by eating a healthy amount of food every day, I was dragging the team down.
So much so that I gave in and started taking these appetite suppressant tablets that Salma had. I still had slightly more meat on my bones compared to the other girls, but it was worth it because our team was beating every other in competitions and the team photos were getting so much praise, not just from Coach Helen, but also the other kids in school. One day, me and my mom were visiting San Antonio to see the Riverwalk. We were in the hotel getting ready when I reached up to pull the curtains apart.
“Honey, what the actual f?” My mom gasped.
I looked at myself in the mirror to see what she was talking about, and that’s when I noticed it. For the first time, I saw my body for what it was. Not Coach Helen’s dream, not beautifully skinny, not a gymnast’s dream. I remembered that I was malnourished, severely underfed, and sickly.
Tears filled my eyes, and that’s when my mom grabbed me.
“Honey, what happened?” “How long has this been going on?”
The desperation in her voice woke me up to how messed up the entire thing was, and I simply told her I’d stop, and I meant it.
