Katharina Buczek
And at first, Victoria was overjoyed. She was playing for a Division I team, making friends, and working her behind off.
What she did not know then, though, was just how much the intense routine switch would impact her body.
“After I started lifting and practicing with a Division I team, my body began to quickly change before my eyes. All of a sudden, I was burning close to one thousand and three hundred calories a practice, lifting heavy weights, and eating around four thousand calories each day,” Victoria said.
“This was a huge change from the routine I had grown accustomed to in high school.”
So, after a few months of hard work on the court and in the weight room, Victoria realized that she was no longer a thin and lean girl.
Instead, she was larger and more muscular– a reality that did not truly set in until she went shopping one weekend during her freshman year.
Victoria’s goal for that shopping trip was to find something that made her feel pretty and girly– because, after all, women sweating in the gym 24/7 and squatting hundreds of pounds were not necessarily viewed as “pretty” or “girly” at the time.
Once she grabbed a ton of clothes to try on in the dressing room, though, Victoria’s heart shattered. The jeans she had picked out would not slide past her thighs, no matter how much she tried.
A shirt that she had snagged was way too tight around her now-muscular arms. And the dress she had adored on the mannequin outside would not even zip up her back.
“Behind the curtains of a five-by-five-foot changing room, I silently began to cry,” Victoria recalled.
And this experience, which so many women have unfortunately suffered, stuck with her.
