Shawn Johnson

Hi everyone and welcome back!

For this blog post I have decided to talk about a specific person that has been affected by eating disorders and society. What I mean by society is what we talked about in my last post, how society continuously judges an athlete by what they look like and have an image of what their body should be looking like.

The athlete I choose for this post is Olympic gold and silver medalist Shawn Johnson. For those who don’t know this athlete she is a gymnast that competed in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Shawn was predicted to win the Olympics but then her teammate Nastia Liukin beat her in the all-around competition. Below I have a video from Shawn talking about the Olympics and what happened to her after.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEmtRuJwb7A

Like I said before, this is a video of Shawn talking about the Olympics. After she was constantly told that she was not good enough and that the person handing her the medal even said sorry because she won silver. She goes on to say how she went on dancing with the stars and was constantly surrounded by models and that she was this short but muscular gymnast. After she explains all this she talks about how blogs and articles would criticize her weight. At one point she says, “it drove me to try and change everything about myself”.

This is what I mean by the last blog post I wrote. Athletes are put in to a bubble of how they should look like, but no one sees that the bubble society created has the capability to ruin the athlete.

“Feeling like the world doesn’t accept you for who you are… it breaks your heart” this is from Shawn in her video about how she felt when society told her she wasn’t good enough and that she didn’t look like a proper athlete.

Shawn fell in to a depression while trying to train for the 2016 Olympics. She goes over how she felt like she couldn’t train properly because she was so deprived of food. I explained in my second post about the different eating disorders and that it’s so dangerous for them to be doing this. Shawn is a perfect example of that happening because she wasn’t getting the proper amount of food she needed to be healthy enough to train.

Elite gymnast train about 30 to 40 hours a week. If they aren’t eating properly then they could be in serious danger, but this goes for all athletes. To work out the number of hours that they do requires taking care of their body and eating appropriately.

I felt that Shawn was a great example to able to talk about how society affect the way she looked at her body. Athletes shouldn’t feel like their bodies aren’t good enough because they’re the ones working out more than anyone else but like I said last week society makes them believe they need to look thinner or more muscular.

Thanks for reading this post! Our next discussion will be talking about how eating disorders have the power to make a person depressed and how they aren’t in a good mental state. See you next time!

Below is a picture of Shawn Johnson in the 2008 Olympics.