I competed at the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as an elite rhythmic gymnast, and after training from the age of six until I was 22, I thought I had developed all the necessary habits for a healthy life: how to eat right, exercise, handle my emotions and take care of my body.
But upon retiring, I struggled to run for more than a minute on the treadmill, and I couldn’t tell when I was full or hungry. After having access to the best mental health resources and physical therapists the world could offer, why was I suddenly having trouble with the basics? Hadn’t I been trained to know my own body, mind and the connection between the two – better than most?
I’d been skinny, all muscle and capable of managing pain for so long. But that didn’t mean I knew what being healthy meant.
Though an overall bill of health might look different for an athlete in peak training form as compared to a retired one, experts say balance is what matters the most. Every aspect of health – physical, mental and emotional – needs to carry equal weight.
Katie Spada, a former college synchronized swimmer turned registered dietician and nutritionist, says that due to the rigor of extreme fitness, athletes are not always as healthy as people might think.
All athletes, Spada observes, will be objectively “healthy” in certain respects, such as having a lean body mass, low resting heart rate and low blood pressure. On the other hand, they might be “unhealthy” in terms of underfueling – female athletes, for example, can develop reproductive health issues due to not having a menstrual cycle while training, which could impact their fertility down the line.
Olympians are defined by a single-minded focus, discipline and perfectionism. But these traits can so easily become toxic during an athletic career, and especially after. You can’t always tell who’s healthy just by how they look, what they say, or even what they do. Doing the right things, like drinking enough water or sleeping eight hours, is undoubtedly important. But health is so much more complicated than that.
Health as ‘fitness’: the fallacy of perfection
When I retired, I was confused about why the habits I equated with health – precise food intake, constant exercise, proprioception – weren’t carrying over into my new life.
“A lot of times when we see fitness, we think health,” says Alexi Pappas, a runner in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, author and advocate for mental health in sport.
“But it’s like comparing apples to oranges,” Pappas says of the transition to retirement. “It’s a little bit myopic to say that the only thing that’s changed is that you’re not competing, when in reality everything’s different.”
Athletes can also be perfectionists, which means that guilt often functions as motivation.
“The recommendation for the average adult is 150 minutes of exercise a week, but most athletes do that in one day, or in one session. So there’s a big gap once athletes retire, because they are known for these behaviors, and they get [rewarded] for being disciplined or motivated,” says Spada. But if athletes continue to aim for this same expectation when it no longer makes sense, that same behavior will get diagnosed as disordered.
An Olympian is used to fine-tuning themselves meticulously every day. The challenge is to readjust expectations, because any new routines will inevitably be less rigorous than the old ones. Exercise for enjoyment, or for basic health, is a concept most athletes have to relearn. We are trained to know what we’ll be doing every day for years, not how to live a life without structure or timeline.
Though this discrepancy always poses a risk, it only becomes an issue for most athletes when they become “Narps”, or what collegiate student-athletes affectionately call “non-athletic regular people”.
It takes kindness, compassion and outside help to realize that sports are not real life. Eventually, it becomes less about regaining control than it does about accepting present circumstances. “When people struggle with their post-athletic career, they need to look at their bigger life and ask themselves, ‘Am I happy with the life choices I’m making? Am I happy with my life?’ Because if they’re not happy with their life, they’re never going to be happy with their body,” says Pappas.
Why balance and mental health are key
Athletes have to remember to incorporate social and emotional balance into their life, because it isn’t the default.
Based on her experience with her post-athletic clients, Spada suspects that chronic stress is one of the leading predictors for future health issues.
“Having that constant level of stress is going to impact you. Stress precedes free radicals, which is what creates cancer, and can lead to chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease or diabetes. The body has to manage that stress somehow, and oftentimes, it leads to autoimmune disorders, which is probably the most common disease I’ve seen in athletes so far.”
Spada says someone whose physical health is improving, but whose mental health is deteriorating, doesn’t count as being healthy. In nutrition, both the physical impact food has on one’s body and the mental relationship one has to food are equally important. “If you don’t feel confident making food choices mentally, it’s not going to benefit you physically,” she says.
Counterbalancing rigid training schedules is important for athletes who are still competing too: Jessica Parratto, a 12-time USA Diving National Champion on her way to Paris for her third Olympics says she needs to “feel balanced in order to be successful”.
She makes space for activities that make her “feel human again and ‘normal’,” like eating junk food or hanging out with friends. “The longer I am hyper focused on being the most regimented, healthy athlete I can be, the more chance there will be for burnout,” she says.
Dr Roberta Kraus, president of the Center for Sports Psychology in Colorado Springs, has worked with elite athletes for over 30 years. She helped lead the Pivot program, a United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee initiative that helps athletes transition after they retire from sport, equipping them with career resources, financial literacy education and access to psychological services.
The single-minded focus of an Olympian, so instrumental to breaking records and achieving athletic success, can prove destructive in the face of life choices that follow. In the aftermath, most athletes don’t know where or how to redirect their focus, while the people who helped manage every element of their professional life are no longer responsible for helping them.
Kraus believes that “just like drug testing is required [once athletes become elite], mental health coaching and seminars on how to manage life after sport” should be required too.
Kraus has also observed a proliferation of “snowplow parents” – parents who invest so much time and money in their child’s pursuits that they begin to feel entitled to some equity in that success – leading to less independent and resilient young people. In addition, she says, coaches don’t want to discuss retirement with Olympians while they’re still training, because they worry “they’re going to derail the athlete’s attention”.
Most athletes start young, and never learn how to apply the soft tools they’ve gained over the years to other spheres of life: how can discipline lead to a job opportunity, or single-minded focus help with decisions about the next stage of life?
“We don’t show athletes the bigger picture,” Kraus says. “We only show them what it’s going to take to get on the podium.”
Rethinking the relationship to food and weight
Many athletes are misinformed about food, and the relationships they develop with it can be problematic. After I retired, I worked extensively with Spada to unpack my nutritional traumas, and she was instrumental to both my recovery and my sanity. She has now had more than 100 clients who are former athletes struggling with their nutritional needs.
“Being fearful of food is not healthy, period,” she says; for instance, eating sugar or fat shouldn’t cause guilt and shame. According to Spada, coaches can make the mistake of being concerned about an athlete’s weight as opposed to their body composition, blaming pounds on the scale for what is in fact a concern about performance ability.
The issue stems from a lack of effective communication, and a lack of education about nutrition.
“When I was competing, if you had to go see the dietician it was either because you were ‘fat’ or you had an eating disorder,” she says. “There was no viewing nutrition as a tool like strength and conditioning.” If the stigma were properly addressed, “we could prevent a lot of challenging conversations, so everyone could understand what the role of food really is.”
Another problematic health practice among athletes is weight cycling. It’s normal – and often necessary – for athletes’ weight to increase or decrease dramatically relative to their competitive season, because it’s impossible to sustain a peak forever.
“But we have seen now in research that weight cycling is more detrimental to one’s health than weight maintenance, regardless of where your weight falls,” Spada says. Gaining and losing 10 to 20lb during a season is standard for some athletes, but this puts pressure on their cardiovascular system. A consistent higher weight “is still healthier than if you were to cycle through weight ranges – outside of the extreme categories of really underweight, or obese,” she says.
How I learned to be healthy after my Olympic career
Caring about my fitness had always served me both physically and professionally. After I retired, I tried to maintain a semi-strict exercise routine, and dutifully keep track of everything I ate. But it quickly became frustrating. What was the point of being healthy if it wasn’t making me the best at something anymore?
I had to learn to make peace with the fact that pursuing new priorities meant making certain trade-offs, and that I didn’t need to aim for some idealized version of myself anymore – I just needed to be the healthiest version of me now. I needed to be honest, and forgive myself for what felt like a lack of accountability. Obsessing over my body and behaviors had served me well as an athlete, but proved a burden in real life.
Focus is what got me to the Olympics, but the opposite of focus is what makes me healthy now. The more I let go of artificial health goals, the healthier I become. Pappas describes health as a state of flow, in which your body “[moves] with you in this kind of harmony”. Rather than strive for excellence, I strive for moderation. By letting go of hard goals in favor of soft ones, my understanding of health has become more flexible, and ultimately more sustainable. For the first time in my life, the less I work hard at something, the more successful I become.
