The first comment was at the 1996 Australian Open. My family and a friend were sitting in the players’ box when they heard it. “That’s Monica Seles? What happened to her? She looks huge!” The guy was a stranger; he didn’t know my family was standing right there. My friend turned around and told him, in no uncertain terms, to take his ignorant comments somewhere else.

The stranger was right, of course. My body was not the same as it used to be. I was still packing an extra twenty pounds on my formerly-thin frame and now my loose shirt couldn’t hide the extra roll around my waist. I was excruciatingly aware that my big thighs were on display every time I served or reached for a ball. I’d been playing tennis for seventeen years—since I was five—and, for the first time ever, I was mortified to wear a tennis skirt.

A few months earlier, I’d won my ninth grand slam in Melbourne, in the midst of my comeback from an unspeakably painful two-year hiatus. I should have been ecstatic and bursting with pride that: I’d beaten the odds and emerged, victorious, from the trauma of being stabbed between the shoulder blades, mid-match, by a deranged man in the crowd wielding a ten-inch boning knife. You’d think I would have savored my first victory after recovering from this devastating injury, with all its attendant physical and psychological pain, but I’d gained weight during my time off and was too upset about the way my body looked to truly enjoy the moment. During the awards ceremony, as people around me clapped wildly, I kept thinking about how good it would feel to get off the court and slip into my roomy sweats.

I’d never struggled with my weight before the attack, and the years that followed were a blur of failed diets and self-loathing punctuated by brief periods of commitment to reclaiming my formerly svelte figure. Now matter how well I was playing or how often I was winning, I woke up every New Year’s morning with a buzzing in my body and mind, thinking “This will be my year to change.” What resolution did I make over and over again? To win another Grand Slam? To work on conditioning and strength? Get a mental edge on the game? No. I had one goal: to be thin. If I could achieve this, everything else would fall into place. I would finally be happy again.

In reality, I only approached contentment while gorging on peanut butter, chocolate and heaping bowls of spaghetti. I required a lot of comfort and found plenty of it in pints of ice cream and greasy bags of chips. So much for willpower. How else could I numb my anger over being knocked down—literally—at the pinnacle of my career, through no fault of my own? I couldn’t stop wondering about what could have been if I hadn’t been stabbed. Even worse, my beloved dad, who was also my coach, mentor and most ardent cheerleader, was sick with cancer. He wanted me to continue competing and traveling, but it was hard to muster the energy when I knew he was slipping away at home.

Life on the road didn’t help matters. I lived out of my suitcase for twelve weeks at a time—packing, unpacking, packing again, eating in a different restaurant every night and boarding another plane every seven days. The list of European tournaments was an ever-changing menu of gastronomic delights. In Paris, I dined on hot, flaky croissants accompanied by a cup of café con creme; Warsaw was all about cheese and potato pierogies slathered in sour cream; of course, when in Rome, I’d gorge on gnocchi with gorgonzola, and so on.

When I was home, training for eight hours a day, my meals were arranged by a succession of nutrition gurus. I received plenty of guidance and encouragement about improving my eating habits, but I wasn’t motivated to adhere to their carefully laid plans. From 7pm onward, I was home alone, with the kitchen pantry right there for the raiding. Within thirty minutes of landing on the couch, remote control in hand, I could obliterate all the progress gained during the day. There were two voices in my head: the angel, urging me to unwind with a cup of herbal tea and an apple, and the devil, tempting me with blocks of cheese and cans of Coke and the escape of a sugar and salt coma. Come on, you’ve been working all day. You deserve it. Guess whose advice I listened to?

When my dad died in 1998, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt empty and directionless, but I remembered how he’d reiterated many times that he expected me to live my life no matter what was happening to him. When he’d been too sick to speak, and I’d been agonizing over whether I should skip the most important part of the season to stay with him, he wrote a few words down on a piece of paper: Don’t be silly. Get on a plane to Rome now. So I did.

One week after we said our last goodbyes, I decided to do as my father had told me once again. I went to Paris for the French Open. This wasn’t a brave decision; I simply couldn’t bear to be in our house for one minute longer. Just like I did after the stabbing, I ran away from my feelings by jumping back on the non-stop, high-speed freight train of the tour. I pushed forward so I wouldn’t have to stop and think the unthinkable: that I’d just lost my father. I’d never hear his voice again. Besides, I thought, isn’t this what he would have wanted?

In my frenzy to keep going, going, going and, of course, to stay at the top of my game, I cycled through TK coaches in the next TK years, each with a different own agenda to get me in shape. Before we embarked on the first workout of a new regime, these smart new coaches would have a food warden on the payroll, ready to tackle the saturated fat right out of my hands. This so-called nutritional consultant even resided in a guest room next to my kitchen in order to foil midnight runs. I needed that kind of deterrent!

One coach, Bobby, told me “It’s not your game, it’s your head that needs work.” I knew he was right: once my head was screwed on straight—once I took responsibility for my wellbeing and made peace with the twin losses of my dad and my pre-attack life— the pounds would fall off and I’d be back in top form. But I couldn’t get my head clear unless my size 14 clothes felt loose. It was a chicken and egg dilemma. Did my self-confidence need to come before my body arrived at its ideal weight or would self-confidence result when I looked great in my tennis skirt? I didn’t have the time or energy to trudge through the messy underbrush of my psyche; I wanted a simple solution.

I found one in the unlikeliest way. In the spring of 2003, I shattered a bone in my ankle during the French Open. When my orthopedic surgeon advised me to take six months off, I balked. Six months? That would mean missing the entire season. By the time I could play again, I’d be almost thirty—known in tennis as “dirty thirty,” harbinger of a career’s end. This wasn’t good. Maybe we could just pin my ankle together and tape up my foot.

“How liberal is your definition of ‘six months?’” I asked, putting air quotes around his insane timetable. He raised his eyebrows. He meant business.
“Six months is six months. There’s no wiggle room.”
Well, that’s that, I thought. I’ll be a blimp in six months, guaranteed. If I weighed 175 pounds while I was working out and competing, I was bound to pork up further while I was sitting on my butt at home. Wiring my jaw shut wasn’t an option, so I consulted my extensive library of nutrition books. How many calories should I consume every day? What, exactly, is a net carb? How did “regular people” eat? Despite—or maybe because of—all the help I’d received from my on-staff nutritionists, I felt completely overwhelmed by the simple task of implementing a “normal” diet into my life. Maybe it was time to take responsibility for what I put into my mouth.

So, I did. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t employ a nutritionist or a coach or a trainer. I decided to wing it. This was a scary prospect, but what else could I do? I was tired and sore. I was sick of working hard and not seeing any results. It was time to decompress.

For years, I’d used food to cope with uncertainty, and this was a hard habit to break. So, the twenty-second rule was born. Before I ripped into a bag of junk food, I forced myself to sit down and count to twenty, slowly. During those twenty second, I concentrated on a simple question: what was really bothering me? Almost every single time, the answer popped into my head before twenty seconds were up. The next question was: what can I do right this minute to help fix it? Did I need to call someone to sort out a misunderstanding? Get paperwork done? Run overdue errands? By the time I came up with something I could do right at that moment, my panic to find something to eat had subsided.

The first couple of months went by quickly. I hung out with my mom, cleaned the house and read a lot of books—none about food. Of course, I had my share of freak-outs. Should I have this ice cream bar? I hardly burned a single calorie today—do I deserve it? Sometimes the answer was yes; sometimes, no. But something groundbreaking was happening. If I did eat the ice cream bar, it wouldn’t launch me into an all-out feeding frenzy. I’d enjoy it, then go into the other room and do something else. I didn’t even notice the change until one night when I was out to dinner with my mom and the waitress came by to clear our plates. “Can I get you ladies some dessert?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m full.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized how rarely I’d ever said them and really meant them.

By the end of the year, I’d lost twenty pounds without trying. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did try but my efforts were so different from that I’d done before that I didn’t feel like I was “trying” to lose weight. First, I refused to say I was “on” a diet, which would imply that I would one day go “off” it. Not too different from all those resolutions I’d made and failed to keep. I’d always set things up in absolutes: No eating after 7pm. No carbs. Lose twenty pounds by next month. Discarding these absolutes was liberating; I basked in the comfortable gray area of moderation.

Taking the time to actually taste my food was nothing short of revelatory. The first time I tried implementing my new plan, I was with friends at a pizza joint in Florida. Okay, here we go, I thought, when the heavenly pie landed directly in front of me. In the past, I would have taken a nosedive into the middle of it, as if I was a contestant in a Coney Island eating contest. This time, I approached like a seasoned athlete perfecting a new technique. I took a couple of breaths and took a bite, savoring the tangy sauce and fresh mozzarella. In between bites, I chatted with my friends and took slow sips of my drink, telling myself, This is not a race. This is not the last pizza I will ever eat. Miraculously, after my first slice, I wasn’t hungry for more.

Up until this point, I’d lived my life in extremes—with seven hour workouts followed by 5,000-calorie binges—and I was ready for a change. I wanted less of everything. Just the word less sounds soothing when it rolls off the tongue. I started carrying the concept with me everywhere, viewing the word less as connected to the word lesson. Even on days when my foot felt good, I didn’t go to the gym or hit the beach for a run. Instead, I walked. Not at a furious pace, but just to walk. This simple exercise was safe for my ankle, and it felt good to move my body without feeling like I was inflicting a punishment on it.

Henry David Thoreau said that the moment his legs began to move his thoughts began to flow. That is exactly what happened to me. When my dad died, I’d forged ahead, never allowing myself a moment to consider how cheated I felt without his guidance, advice and humor. For the first time, I mustered the courage to stare down the black hole of his absence. I missed my dad; thinking about him felt good.

My walks also produced a symbiotic relationship between my mind and my body. The more forgiving I was to my body—abandoning the old routine of jarring, demanding workouts—the more forgiving the demons in my head became, until I could hardly hear them at all. Seventy-five percent of the weight I lost that year was due to portion control and after-dinner walks around my neighborhood. I didn’t get on a treadmill once.

My heart was full of grief over my dad; my head was full of what could have been if I’d never been stabbed. But I began to realize a fundamental truth. It bubbled up inside me, in my core: the sense that I would be okay on my own. I would be okay if I never won another Grand Slam. I would be okay if I never played another professional match. I would be okay; I would find a new purpose, a new reason to get up every morning.

But knowing something on an analytical level is different from knowing on an emotional level. I’d been shoving my problems to the back of my mind with the help of food. Tomorrow, I’ll take care of it tomorrow, I’d tell myself between bites. Tomorrow would turn into a week and that week would turn into five extra pounds of procrastination. My dad drilled into me over and over that I had only one life to live so I better live it the best I could. Every time I sat down to a meal, I had to make a decision. Was I going to treat myself with love and respect or was I going to sabotage my own happiness and health for a short-term rush? Soon enough, the decision was easy. In my new life, I choose nourishment over destruction every time.