Elizaveta Tuktamysheva: “When you’re thin, you’re told that your jumps work – ‘so you win competitions, so you’re valuable.’ That chain needs to be broken. Because you are valuable as you are.”
Elizaveta Tuktamysheva shares how her attitude toward thinness and weight in figure skating has changed over time.
original source: Sposrts
Tuktamysheva talks about how her attitude toward thinness in sport has evolved. World figure skating champion spoke about how her perspective on her own weight has changed. Here’s a translation of her comments.
“The older you get, the more you grow, the more feminine you become, the more thoughts you have in your head, your body changes… And that’s the toughest period in sport.
Because you just have to wait it out; you can’t get rid of it. You can’t push it away with pressure or constant weighing… Well, maybe you can, but only for a year, probably.
Everyone faces this at some point. And here, the most important thing is for the athlete’s immediate circle to understand that it will pass. That it won’t always be this hard, and you won’t always feel disgusted with yourself. I think every athlete has felt this way. Many have.
At least for me, there was a time when you live and you don’t like yourself simply because your value as an athlete is tied to being thin. When you’re thin, you’re told that your jumps work – ‘so you win competitions, so you’re valuable.’ That chain needs to be broken. Because you are valuable as you are. It doesn’t matter how much you weigh.
And that realization comes later. When it came to me, I said, ‘That’s it, I’m not going to weigh myself anymore.’ My coaches must have seen some awareness in me, because they never mentioned weighing again. I started eating normally, stopped being afraid of breakfast. None of us ate breakfast, because there was always a weigh-in in the morning,” Tuktamysheva shared on Yana Churikova’s YouTube channel.
Related topics: Elizaveta Tuktamysheva
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