Swimming star Emily Seebohm has opened up about what sparked her eating disorder and says she wants to inspire a positive change in younger athletes.
The 29-year-old, who has represented Australia at four Olympics, revealed it was a swimming official’s off-hand comment about her body in 2019 that triggered a two-year battle that almost destroyed her career.
Seebohm said she found herself locked into a cycle of pushing her body to the limit in the pool, gruelling gym workouts, starving herself, and then binging and purging.
Emily Seebohm (pictured) has revealed an off-hand comment from a swimming official sent her spiralling into an eating disorder
‘They said the only way I was going to do better than I’d ever done was to be smaller than I was… and those words became stuck in my brain,’ Seebohm told The Daily Telegraph.
Shen then applied herself to becoming thinner with the same focus and drive that had seen her rise to top of her sport.
‘I was really willing to do whatever it took, I was told to lose weight and I was going to do it… I trained all the time so I didn’t think about food,’ Seebohm said.
Her typical training day involved swimming 5km in the pool in the morning, a weights session in the gym, followed by cardio and then back in to the pool for another 5km.
At night she would fall into bed too exhausted to eat, but when her hunger became too much she would binge on food, feel guilty and then abuse laxatives.
Compounded by a break-up with her Australian swim-team and fellow Olympian boyfriend Mitch Larkin in 2018, Seebohm said the vicious cycle began to take its toll on her mental health.
Seebohm said she would train so hard she would forget about food until she was starving and would then binge
The 29-year-old displaying her Tokyo Olympic Games bronze medal (pictured) after coming back from a ‘low point’
‘The harder I tried the worse I felt… I’d lost so much confidence in my swimming and in my life in general, it was such a low point.’
In mid-2019 she failed to make the Australian world championship team – for the first time since she was 14.
After the trials she decided she needed to take control of the situation and she called up a dietician and began going to twice weekly appointments.
Among the advice she received was to not wait until she was starving to eat and other small but important changes she describes as like ‘retraining’ her brain to eat normally.
In addition she also joined up with successful swimming coach Michael Bohl on the Gold Coast who reset her swimming training.
The two changes paid off with Seebohm not only making the Australian squad for Tokyo but also claiming two medals.
Seebohm (pictured) said she now has a much healthier relationship to food
While fellow Aussie Kayle McKeown, 20, won the gold in both her 200m and 100m backstroke finals at the Tokyo Games – Seebohm’s specialty – she finished third in the 200m backstroke.
She also won a gold for her heat swim in the Women’s 4x100m medley relay.
In a heartwarming display of true sportsmanship, McKeown asked Seebohm to stand beside her on the first place podium while they posed for photos with their medals.
After the race, McKeown’s older sister Taylor shared a throwback picture of the pair on Instagram with Kaylee at the time years away from her first gold, but ever inspired by Seebohm.
‘How one icon inspired another. This is where it started VS where it’s at,’ she said after sharing a photo of the pair with their medals.
‘A truly inspirational duo for the world to see.’
Seebohm is now an ambassador for an eating disorder support network, EndED, an organisation based on the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland.
She is also set to tour schools to to share her inspirational story.
Kaylee McKeown’s sister Taylor has shared an adorable snap of the recent gold medallist from when she was just a little girl posing with her childhood hero and now Olympic teammate Emily Seebohm