My Journey as Figure Skater

I am a figure skater, and I started to skate back in kindergarten. Back then, it was just for fun, an activity that just filled the nap time after lunch. I had a friendly and supportive coach who gave me the chance to compete in my first ever skating competition. He was really nice to me, and skating was merely a part of my life and a hobby that I loved to do. It didn’t require me to do anything extra to satisfy the sport or anyone else. All of this changed dramatically, when my family moved to Beijing.

We found this new rink and this new coach who has a completely different coaching method and style than my previous coach. He was a lot more scary, as in he would always shout across the rink and that made me feel not only afraid of him, but also just afraid of the sport in general. Not only did he have pretty high expectations formy skating, he also started my lifelong eating disorder. For context, eating disorders are very common amongst skaters, and under his method, eating very little is essential for doing jumps and maintaining them. That was when I learned that not only did skating as for a lighter weight, it also asked for controlled height as if skaters are too tall, that will make jumps unstable, and we also need to control foot size because changing our skates constantly will also lead to jump instability, unless you are Ilia Malinin and can jump a triple axel even in another person’s skates. Eating less wasn’t the most toxic thing for a first grader back then, someone else on the team who also trained with my coach had a grandma who really liked to brag about her granddaughter, and grandma said that: “my granddaughter can skate for three hours or more just with half a spoonful of fried rice or just half a dumpling.” This turned eating less into a competition, of who can survive the longest on the least amount of fuel. There was also this girl who trained at the rink I was at but with another coach, and she is also the perfect example of restrictive eating: she ate only one cup of food every meal. Her mom formed a dome shape with her thumb and index finger to show how much she ate every meal.

That was when I started dieting, and when I first joined the team, another coach at the rink once called me a “小胖子” in Chinese, which means little fattie in English. I didn’t feel offended or upset or anything back then, I just didn’t think that I was fat, so I didn’t understand why he would call me that. However, that stuck with me, until now, and that was also when my parents started taking this whole weight control thing very seriously, as they of course don’t want me to get called “little fattie” by some middle aged figure skating coach.

Second grade was when this whole weight thing really weighed down on me. I started to train for the axel and other doubles, so that when the need of losing weight and maintaining it was at its highest. It was when I officially went on a no-carb, no-dinner diet, and had a specific goal for my weight. That was when I had to weigh myself twice a day, and start to eat the lunch that my mom packed for me. It was a salad. Yes, a lettuce, tomato, cucumber salad, and sometimes with 4-5 pieces of shrimp or steak bit and 4-5 pieces of penne pasta coated in a olive oil Chinese black vinegar dressing. That was lunch. On some days however, I still had to buy lunch myself, but this whole idea of no-carbs and restrictive eating was so ingrained in my mind that I did not less myself eat whatever want even so. One day, I was in line getting lunch, and the first thing that we needed to get is some sort of carb, and that day it was rice and corn. Yes, that is how clearly I remember it. The boy in front of me said to the lunch lady: “I want both” while me standing behind him said: “I want neither.” He turned his head back to me and looked shocked. I just laughed it off, but it was almost like something that I can’t control when I really could, an idea or mentality that was so instilled in my head that anything couldn’t change it. That day, my lunch plate had some bok choy and a few pieces of this stir-fried beef with bell peppers.

Because I always ate so little, I remember my stomach was always empty. I didn’t know that that was the feeling of one’s stomach feeling empty, but it is only now I realize that that was true. Even though I didn’t know that I was running on no fuel at that time, I was however, eating whatever I could find around me. I was eating things like goji berries, American Ginseng, and Ejiao. All of those things should not be eaten by children in large amounts but I didn’t care, I ate whatever was within my sight. Those foods were meant to be breakfast foods in my household, but to me, they are just regular snacks. I always wonder now, how I survived all that training and just everyday life with that level of hunger.

In third grade, the pandemic hit, and I started to gain weight, and so did all the other girls around me. My weight went from 31.3kg to above 32kg, and that was just within the first week of quarantine. So I really didn’t know what to do, given that quarantine seemed like forever when it first started. I remember my mom throwing two bags of peanuts that each weighed half a kilo at me so that I will “understand how severe it is”. However, all of this not eating dinner and no-carb diet went on until fifth grade, and that was when I stopped training with my coach four times a weeks and stopped doing jumps.

After stopping training, things got a little better. I could eat carbs, and I also took up running. However, my mom would still be pretty strict about how I looked. I remember we looked at this one photo of me when I was in second grade, sitting on a bench in Dsineyland in Tokyo and she would always say things like: “oh look, you were so skinny back then, your legs were so skinny, your face is so small, if only you just lose about 10kg, you would probably look the same as before.” To her, looking skinny and weighing lighter solves everything, but what she doesn’t know is that the Margaret back then did not feel satisfied about her body at all. She felt fat. Yes, the overweight kind of fat. Even though she was eating so little. She felt like everyone around her was skinnier than her and better-looking than her. This was when she was in second grade. She felt like she needed to lose weight and eat less, because she was fat.

That was how toxic it got. Even when I stopped skating so much, like when I was in sixth grade, I would always look in the mirror to check if my legs were skinny enough, my hands were boney enough, etc. I know that my mom wants the best for me. She just wants me to be accepted in this society as in the community we were in before, you would only be accepted and seen as “good enough” to do what is shown if only you “had the body for it”. I don’t blame her for anything, we are just different, but I don’t want this difference to exist anymore for young girls and girls and boys who are doing figure skating. I want everyone to feel included in the sport and accepted for who they are. What was the result of me dieting and controlling my weight? Well, I did land all of my doubles and axel jump, and also a binge eating disorder of me always needing to eat until I feel stuffed. That has been my problem for the past 3 or 4 years ever since I stopped training so often. Whenever I go around the house searching for food, I get flashbacks of how I used to do it back in second grade because I did it for the same purpose—not satisfied by the amount of food I was given. This mentality of still being skinny is still present within me, as even though I might not be that obsessed about my weight and skinniness as my mom, whenever I look in the mirror, I still worry whether I have legs that are skinny enough.

This is involuntary, but I guess without all that happened in elementary school, I probably wouldn’t have all the mentality that I have now. I just hope that more young girls and figure skaters and just athletes in general don’t have to go through this process because it plants something in you, that is very hard to remove and change.