I found this article on Tanith Belbin in the New York Times and wanted to share it with everyone. Thought is was extremely interesting and right up our alley!
New Muscles and Pounds Boost an American Ice Dancer’s Outlook
By JULIET MACUR
Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto en route to winning the silver medal at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in January of this year.
Back then, she never thought her legs were too spindly or that her body was too chopstick-thin for her to be a strong skater. She thought she looked just fine.
“Ugh, I was so thin,” Belbin said in a recent interview at Ice Works, the rink where she trains with her partner, Ben Agosto. “You could see my bones jutting out; you could totally see my chest bone sticking out.”
Heading into their second Games, Belbin and Agosto, the Olympic silver medalists in 2006, are once again among the favorites to win a medal in the competition, which begins Friday with the compulsory dance. What should give them an edge this time, Belbin said, is something she would have never dreamed could help them: her newly found muscles and curves.
She can thank one of her coaches, Natalia Linichuk, for that.
Linichuk and Gennadi Karponosov, who were the 1980 Olympic ice dancing champions, began coaching Belbin and Agosto in the summer of 2008, when Belbin and Agosto left suburban Detroit for a fresh start.
Linichuk took one look at the 5-foot-6, 105-pound Belbin and said, “You need to gain 10 pounds.” She said more muscle would help Belbin skate faster and more fluidly.
“At first, I said no way, but then I started to understand that it needed to be done,” said Belbin, who is from Kirkland, Quebec, but holds dual citizenship. “I don’t feel like I had a safe, well-thought-out or well-researched diet until the past few years, until Natalia gave me that ultimatum.”
As it turned out, Linichuk also ended up saving Belbin from a problem that has long plagued figure skaters: disordered eating. Often not as severe as eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, disordered eating involves irregular eating habits that can be fueled by a distorted body image. Belbin said she had struggled with those issues since puberty.
When she was 16 or 17, Belbin grew several inches and gained weight, which threw off her skating technique. As her body matured, she tried to fight it. As an ice dancer who wears tiny outfits and is often lifted by her partner, Belbin said that every extra pound seemed like 20.
She never binged, purged or used laxatives, she said, but she restricted her calories to the minimum. She would eat a small breakfast, then later snack on celery or a few almonds to get her through the day. After practices, she was too weak to lift her arms. Once in her apartment, she would stare blankly ahead, sapped of energy.
When she could not control her hunger, she would eat a huge dinner and find herself two pounds heavier. It horrified her.
“I thought I was out of control and that the weight gain must be my fault,” she said. “I was like, I’m eating nothing and I’m still not losing weight. I swear, I’m not eating anything and I’m exhausted and cranky and stressed and all of those things that make you gain weight even more.”
Agosto, who is from Chicago, said those eating problems were common in skating, where pressure is placed on female skaters to be wispy beauties. Because they are judged on their looks and performances from a young age, some skaters cannot help becoming overly self-critical, he said.
“I was always worried about her health, worried that she wasn’t eating enough,” Agosto said. “But I was almost too close to it to realize how big of a problem it really was.”
As Belbin became thinner, others noticed. In the skating world, rumors about Belbin’s having an eating disorder started to spread, said Gerri Walbert, the executive editor of Blades on Ice magazine.
Judges would pull Belbin aside. “They would say to me: ‘Are you O.K.? Are you eating enough?’ ” Belbin recalled. “But I never really understood what they were implying because they never came out and said that I looked too thin.”
Belbin’s former coaches Igor Shpilband and Marina Zoueva said they had encouraged her to eat more.
“She was going through really tough stages, when all girls’ weight fluctuates,” Zoueva said. “She was a little too thin, so we always tried to work with her on that.”
Belbin tried different types of diets that restricted her protein or her carbohydrates. But Linichuk’s order to gain weight changed that. Suddenly, Belbin was forcing herself to eat.
“It was a difficult change, and Natalia knew I would feel uncomfortable with my body for a while,” said Belbin, who did not seek professional help for her diet. “But I knew it would be worth it.”
Belbin began reading books about nutrition and eating lunch at the rink. She learned to eat foods that would best sustain an athlete’s body.
She also began training harder off the ice, lifting weights, doing push-ups and participating in Karponosov’s boot camps, which involve hard-core skating drills to strengthen the legs.
Karponosov’s skaters would often complain that his drills made their legs so muscular that they could no longer fit into their jeans.
“I was always like, there will never be a day when I can’t fit into my jeans,” Belbin said. “But this past summer, I came to him and said my jeans are so tight. I never thought I’d see that change in my body. It really, really made a difference. It feels good, though.”
Belbin began marveling at her new body. She had gained 10 pounds. Her waist size increased two inches because her core was so much stronger.
Agosto could see a huge difference in Belbin’s skating. During lifts, she was no longer a sack of potatoes, holding on for dear life. She could hold her positions much better, and that made it easier for Agosto because she did not move around as much.
Belbin says she wishes she had learned the importance of nutrition long ago. She said U.S. Figure Skating officials would have provided a nutritional counselor if she had asked them for one. But that phone call “never fit into her busy day,” Belbin said. In the end, she preferred educating herself.
“The message shouldn’t be, go consult a nutritionist; we need more education,” she said. “Skaters always sit there and wait to be told what to do, but in this case, they need to take the initiative and find out how to eat healthy.”
For Belbin, that effort has paid off, on the rink and off. In the past, she had always declined Agosto’s offers to try rock climbing at an indoor gym in Philadelphia, thinking she was too weak to lift her body even a foot off the floor.
But last year, Belbin took Agosto up on his offer. On her second try, she climbed straight to the top.
