Before Jessie Diggins made history this month as the first U.S. cross-country skier to win both an Olympic gold medal and World Cup, the Stratton-trained athlete faced an even more life-altering challenge.
Swallowing a hamburger and fries without sobbing.
Diggins, 29, rewinds back a decade to her senior year at her native Minnesota’s Stillwater Area High.
“On the outside, school and sports and dating were going great,” she recalls. “But on the inside, it was a whole different story.”
While classmates saw her as an all-American free spirit and picture of fitness, Diggins — watching her body morph from a girl to a woman — simply eyed fat. After a pancake breakfast one morning, she drove to a nearby gas station bathroom and stuck her finger down her throat.
“What I had just done was literally the definition of bulimia: You eat, you feel shame and you throw up,” she recalls. “But in that moment, I believed eating disorders only happened to other people.”
And so Diggins continued the cycle — even as she coughed up blood — until a family intervention led her to The Emily Program and its national nonprofit network of treatment centers. There, a dietitian, explaining why eating was important, served up a hamburger and fries and said the skier couldn’t leave until she finished.
Diggins sobbed for two hours before she ate what most teenagers would inhale in two minutes.
“It felt like the end of everything,” she says of the meal. “But I got through it. I survived.”
What Diggins calls a “breakdown” ultimately was a breakthrough. Once back on track, the part-time Vermonter would win the first Olympic gold medal in U.S. cross-country history at the 2018 Winter Games and, on Sunday, become the first American woman to snag her discipline’s equally prestigious World Cup.
“The thing I’m most excited about isn’t the results, but that I can reach more people,” she said at a resulting online press conference that drew reporters from around the globe. “This gives me the chance to push forward the causes I care about.”
That’s why Diggins is sharing her eating disorder story, both through interviews from her Stratton condominium and the 2020-21 season finals in Switzerland as well as in a new memoir, “Brave Enough,” from the University of Minnesota Press.
“I’m so lucky to be here and be alive,” she says. “This secret, left to its own devices, might have killed me.”
‘I couldn’t think straight … so I did it’
Diggins still remembers the first time she saw ski racing on a VHS tape.
“I’m not going to lie … I wasn’t all that into it,” she writes in her book. “I thought it was kind of boring.”
Then she learned the winners left with a prize.
“I was super hooked on the idea of getting a medal once you crossed the finish line.”
Joining the Minnesota Youth Ski League at age 3, Diggins ran out of levels to compete in by age 10. Worried about juggling homework with practice six days a week, she almost didn’t join the cross-country team in seventh grade, only to train with the varsity girls and, by her senior year of high school, score straight A’s and a state championship.
“I had everything in the world going for me and nothing to complain about,” she recalls. “But I was trying so hard to be perfect. Everything that I did needed to be all or nothing, 100% of the time.”
That included trying to tame her changing body. Diggins didn’t see herself as an emerging woman but instead as a once-skinny girl inexplicably gaining weight.
She exercised more, only to work up a hunger to eat more, only to exercise more. Exhausted by the cycle, she made herself throw up for the first time a week after graduation.
“I felt such intense anxiety, shame and unrest that I couldn’t think straight … so I did it.”
She was surprised by what happened next.
“The act of throwing up hollowed me out emotionally as well as physically, and honestly, it felt like a huge relief. All of the stress that had been building and building … was suddenly nowhere to be found.”
Diggins recalls her eyes spilling with tears — yet the rest of her strangely calm.
“I started to understand why people are alcoholics or addicted to drugs. Because the ability to suddenly feel nothing was amazing.”
Unlike people with anorexia who seek to lose weight, Diggins says her bulimia was more about not wanting to gain it. The only noticeable signs were occasional bloodshot eyes from the strain of throwing up. She couldn’t see the damage to her body chemistry and the resulting threat of heart failure.
Diggins’ parents eventually deduced something was wrong. She met with a therapist once a week for months, only to relapse after going through the motions rather than fully acknowledging the problem.
After a hard practice, for example, her heartbeat seemed out of control.
Diggins was on a proverbial cliff, the doctor said.
“You are coming very close,” the skier recalls hearing, “to something we call ‘the edge.’”
‘The hardest thing I will probably ever do’
That’s when Diggins entered The Emily Program’s intensive treatment clinic, where she learned another secret: “It wasn’t really about food.”
Instead, she faced a complex illness rooted in biology, genetics and her mind — specifically, through a desire for something to control.
“I realized that eating disorders didn’t affect just stressed-out, type-A endurance athletes like me. They affected women and men, rich and poor, people of every color and background, every sexual orientation, young and old.”
Through therapy, Diggins has learned ways to cope — and eat.
“My eating disorder had hijacked my brain so severely that when food was in front of me, all I heard inside my own head was a warning to not eat anything.”
She remembers sobbing through that breakdown meal.
“Here I was, a 19-year-old girl who couldn’t eat a hamburger and french fries, which was such a normal lunch for so many people. Then I realized I didn’t instantly gain 20 pounds. I didn’t instantly derail my ski career. The world didn’t end.”
Instead, Diggins’ current success began. Competing at this month’s final World Cup races in Engadin, Switzerland, she found time to plug into an Instagram Live chat with “Grey’s Anatomy” actor Patrick Dempsey.
“Going through treatment for my eating disorder was by far the hardest thing I will probably ever do in my life, and so in comparison to that, ski racing is easy,” she told him. “One of the stats that’s the most heartbreaking is one person in the world dies every hour from an eating disorder. We don’t often see them as life-threatening illnesses, but they really are.”
Diggins encourages anyone with warning signs to reach out to a health care provider.
“Sometimes, especially as athletes, we feel like we have to be perfect with this hard-shell exterior, but that’s not human. Whether or not it’s an eating disorder, we all struggle with something in life. And it’s OK to ask for and receive help.”
Diggins will return to Stratton to prepare for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. As she continues to train, she’ll continue to talk.
“In racing, I want to cross the finish line and look back and say, ‘I used this chance, and I gave it my all.’ That’s the approach I have with advocacy, too. I have a much bigger platform, and I’ve found myself thinking, ‘I have to do something with this.’ If there’s a way I can make a difference, then I want to try.”
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