Discipline. I’ve Been Redefining It For 46 Years

I’ve been redefining discipline since I was 16 years old.

Gymnastics gave me an eating disorder.

It also gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life.

Discipline.

Both statements are true.

That’s what has made this word so fucking complicated for me.

Gymnastics and discipline. Life and discipline. Just the word discipline. I’ve always had a really hard time with it. 

It’s time to unpack why.  

It’s been no secret that I had an eating disorder in high school. I have written about it quite often. So let’s start there. 

I started gymnastics when I was 12 years old. I was a little older than most girls, but I fell in love with it immediately. I loved the challenge. I loved learning new skills. I loved that there was always something to work toward. It taught me how to practice, how to fall, how to get back up and how to keep showing up when something felt impossible. 

When I look back, I see that it laid the foundation for the work ethic I still have today. But somewhere along the way the rules changed. Or maybe I was finally old enough to notice them. Not at first, because at first I thought that was just the way things were. 

When I was 16 years old, I weighed 116 pounds. My coach told me I needed to lose ten. Even now thinking about that… so fucked up. Looking back, that’s where my relationship with my body started to change. At that time though I wasn’t thinking about body image. I wasn’t worried about fitting into smaller clothes. I was a teenager who wanted to be better at the sport of gymnastics. I wanted to please my coach. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to belong somewhere. 

So when an adult I respected told me I needed to lose weight, I believed him. I ordered the pink trifold diet from either Teen or Seventeen magazine. I honestly can’t remember which one. It doesn’t really matter. Diet culture was alive and well long before Instagram.

I didn’t become bulimic because I wanted to have an eating disorder. I think deep down I hoped I would become a better gymnast if I was smaller. I was strong AF even then. I could crank out pull-ups like crazy. 

So why did I need to be smaller? 

Eating disorders don’t always begin with vanity. Sometimes they begin with obedience. Sometimes they begin with trying to earn approval or belonging.

I remember trying not to eat. I remember the dark circles under my eyes and I remember how tired I was all.the.time. Yeah, my body had no fuel.

I recovered before I graduated from high school. My gymnastics career ended before my senior year. Another comment from a different coach solidified my decision. This coach kept telling me he could ensure I would be top ten in the state on bars. That was my favorite event. But that summer, before my senior year, a friend and I were at practice. He told us to get down on our backs and then added, “that’s probably your best position anyway.” He later apologized to my friend, but not to me. That was it. My gymnastics career ended before my senior year. Looking back, maybe that was the first time I chose myself over someone else’s opinion of me.

I really continued to struggle with body image for many years after that. The voice was always there, wondering if I was lean enough. The critical eye in the mirror. Believing that my body was the thing that stopped me from having success. Those thoughts don’t disappear just because the behaviors did. The eating disorder was in the rearview. The thinking wasn’t. 

But, here’s the irony. 

Gymnastics also gave me the discipline that has served me for the rest of my life. It taught me how to work. It taught me how to repeat something a thousand times until I got it right. It taught me how to stay with hard things and how to fail, but not quit. It taught me how to do what needed to be done, even when I didn’t feel like doing it. 

That discipline built my business. It built my coaching. It shaped my life. It shaped me. So yes, I have a complicated relationship with the word DISCIPLINE. 

For years, discipline wasn’t what I thought it was.

I thought discipline meant ignoring my body.

Ignoring hunger.

Ignoring exhaustion.

Ignoring emotions.

Pushing harder.

Eating less.

Never needing a break.

Never messing up.

But looking back, I realized none of that was discipline. 

I confused discipline with perfection and punishment. I confused it with earning my worth. 

I think that is super common with a lot of women. I see it every single day. Women tell me all the time they need “more discipline.” That’s still why the word makes me cringe.

What they usually mean is they think they need to eat less and be stricter and more rigid and more fucking perfect. That’s not discipline. 

Today, discipline means something completely different to me.

Real discipline is eating enough to fuel my body instead of seeing how little I can survive on. That one took me decades to believe.

It’s taking a rest day because my body needs recovery, not because I fucking “earned” it. 

It’s strength training because I want to be strong when I am 70 and beyond, not because I’m trying to erase what I ate yesterday. 

It’s tracking my food honestly instead of pretending the bites and licks and tastes don’t count. Newsflash, they sure do. 

That version of discipline doesn’t leave me exhausted.

It doesn’t make me hate my body.

It doesn’t require me to become someone I’m not.

It lets me build a life I actually enjoy living.

Perfection demands that you never fail. Discipline expects that you will and asks what you will do next. 

I don’t hate gymnastics. I don’t hate the coach who wanted me to lose weight. He was coaching in a culture that probably thought lighter meant better. The messages were loud, even then.

It doesn’t erase what happened for sure. I’ve had decades to think about what discipline really means. 

I think I’ve finally landed somewhere that feels honest. 

Discipline without self-respect becomes punishment. 

Discipline with self-respect becomes freedom. 

I still use the discipline gymnastics gave me. I just don’t use it against myself. And maybe that’s the greatest lesson I’ve learned. The sport that made me question my body eventually led me back to trusting myself. I will keep that perspective.  

And maybe that is why I’ve had such a complicated relationship with the word discipline.  

I’ve been redefining it since I was 16 years old.

The version I was being praised for was the version doing the most harm.

Today, discipline isn’t about becoming smaller.

It’s about becoming stronger.

It’s about keeping promises to myself.

It’s about taking care of my body instead of trying to conquer it.

Gymnastics taught me discipline.

Life taught me what that word was supposed to mean.

And today…

I think the two have finally started to make peace.