Monica Seles has written the kind of book she thinks she’d needed to read in her darkest days, a lesson in conquering the demons of food without that dreaded word diet.
Seles figures she bought every self-help book on the market. She felt sure that if she just found the right diet, if she just hired the right trainer, she’d lose weight and reclaim her tennis career.
Instead Seles would gain it back as quickly as she dropped it, sneaking off on late-night supermarket runs and bingeing on junk food in secret. Seeking refuge from the pain and confusion of dual tragedies, she put on more than 16kg.
“When I started on this journey, I had all the diet books, I knew what to do, I worked with the famous trainers,” Seles said in an interview on Monday. “But yet I couldn’t get it.”
Now the 35-year-old Seles has written a book of her own: Getting a Grip on My Body, My Mind, My Self which was released yesterday. It’s technically a memoir, chronicling her rise from a tennis-loving kid to the No. 1 player in the world.
Seles tried so many diets.
“I could recite them for you sitting here,” she said. “But until I realized that I held that power — not my trainer, not my coach, not my family, but me — that’s when I think I started to shift in the way I thought.”
In April 1993, Seles was 19 years old and had already won nine Grand Slam titles. That life shattered during a match in Hamburg, Germany, when Seles was stabbed by a spectator. Weeks later, her father was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1998 after a long battle with the disease.
Seles returned to tennis and won one more Grand Slam. But her mind and body weren’t the same. It took her more than nine years, her weight and emotions constantly yo-yoing, before she fully grasped the connection between the two.
“I hired some fantastic trainers, some fantastic nutritionists,” Seles said. “But unfortunately no one paid attention to where these emotions were coming from.”
“I felt weird that I couldn’t control a simple thing like eating,” she said. “I was so in control when you’d watch me on the tennis court, but yet what I put in my mouth I had zero control [over].”
She’s certain that carrying around all that extra weight led to the string of injuries that eventually ended her career.
Her 30th birthday approaching, unable to work out because of injury, Seles panicked that she would gain even more weight. Instead, without any trainers or nutritionists to tell her what to do, she started to relax about food. No more calorie-counting or bingeing
She thought about why the women she saw in Asia and Europe seemed to be thinner than Americans, and she realized it helps that they walk so much. She found she would walk outside because she enjoyed it, not because she felt she had to.
After all those years of wanting to lose weight, Seles accomplished it only after she stopped really trying. She learned to savor food and listen to her appetite, to eat because she’s hungry — not just because something is in front of her.
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