National Team as a teen caused her to develop an eating disorder. On the Dinner Party with Jeremy Fall podcast, Shawn said that "flaws" within the sport helped lead to her disorder, since she didn't have access to nutritionists and psychologists as a young athlete.
I think I was more mature and I had a better group of people around me to deal with what I was going through," she said, before explaining the problem. Shawn shared, "When I started to starve myself and jeopardize my performance, but still win a gold medal, that is probably one of the worst things that could have happened, because that told me it was worth it.
Shawn explained that her accomplishments in gymnastics reinforced her perceived need to starve herself. And it was this active effort I would have to put forward every single day to kind of battle that voice.
And when you get tired, you can't battle it any longer, and it's like, 'I need a binge, I need a purge, I need to not eat, I need to eat so much,' and I would just spiral so much that you lose control as a human. The all-around World Champion said she really suffered from to , between the Beijing Olympics and the London Olympics. Now that I didn't have that, I felt lost as a human being. Shawn hit an "all-time low" with her depression, which made her consider a return to gymnastics because it was "the last time I remembered being happy.
Suddenly, she and I were speaking the common jargon of modern digital media and the constant struggle to attract and retain an audience. A decade ago, East, now 25, earned gold and silver medals with precision gymnastics routines. Her effort would build up to a single moment of competition in which a handful of expert judges determined her fate. But now she earns gold from casual, barely scripted scenes from her everyday life with her husband, Andrew East, who played NFL football.
It might be harder now to know exactly what success looks like compared with the days when you knew an athlete had hit the big time because they were pictured on the front of a Wheaties cereal box. I spoke to Shawn on the phone earlier this week shortly after I returned from a reporting trip to China. It was there in at the Beijing Olympic when she was a year-old Shawn Johnson winning four medals. Somehow, I never had interviewed Shawn until this week.
She watched it — of course — via online video. Shawn and her parents have spent years processing the overwhelming and lingering effects of global fame. She was back home in Iowa recently to catch up with her parents during a rare break. Not only are she and her fellow investors pitched products, such as a custom mountain bike or hammock boat not making that up.
And in that crazy, only in a love story kind of way, it was the Olympics that brought her and East together. But not the year she won the gold. It happened four years later, in , when she was in London representing USA Gymnastics and watching her cyclist friend, Taylor Phinney , compete. Turns out one of Phinney's teammates was Guy East — and Guy quickly became convinced that the joyful, petite blonde he just met needed to meet his football-playing brother, Andrew. Guy was so convinced, in fact, that a few months after the Olympics, he got Andrew on a plane to Los Angeles to meet Johnson while she competed on "Dancing With the Stars.
But love didn't happen at once. They had a fleeting meeting six months later at the Indy in East's hometown. And then, finally, in June , Johnson made a trip to Nashville. Their first official date began tailgating and watching a Vanderbilt baseball game from the top of a parking garage with a bunch of East's football buddies. Then they drove through the city, stopping at the Parthenon, checking out Broadway and eating at Loveless Cafe.
By the end of the adventure, Johnson was smitten — with Andrew and the city. She moved to Nashville four months later.
0コメント