Confessions of a Skater With an Eating Disorder

At the height of her figure skating career, former Four Continents Champion Jennifer Kirk had a secret. “Unfortunately, my secret wasn’t very unique,” she writes for True/Slant. “I had an eating disorder.” And so did many of her friends. “The skating world fostered the disease and made the completely horrible things I was doing to my body seem ‘normal.’”

Kirk tells of coaches publicly weighing skaters at regular intervals, noting the results and making “insensitive comments,” or of coaches telling waiters at restaurants that their girls were allergic to butter and oil. To escape that enabling culture, Kirk quit skating—the year before what would have been her first Olympics. But “ruining your health, even if it means achieving Olympic gold, is just not worth it." (More figure skating stories.)