Nastia Liukin on Body Shame & Healthy Living

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“I gained like 25 pounds, and my body had no idea what was going on. I stopped [working out] cold turkey,” she explained. “That was really hard. I had just moved to New York, I didn’t know anybody, and I just started going to school. My mind was crazy, my body was crazy, so I started doing all different types of work outs. I never lifted a weight in my entire life — training was just your body weight.”

“Now I’m fit and in shape, but I struggled with the same thing that everybody else did — my skin was bad, my weight was changing, I hated the way I looked in any clothes,” she revealed. “A lot of people never realized that because I never really talked about it. It’s hard to talk about stuff like that when you’re not happy or confident. It’s easy to talk about things if you’ve never been through it… I try not to look at the comments, but it’s hard not to. Now that I don’t have the muscle that I had when I was competing at the Olympics, I’m ‘too skinny.’ Whichever way the comments go, it’s hard to take. We all have a heart and a soul; I try to put up this wall, but it’s so difficult to do that. We’re all the same when it comes down to it.”