Monica Seles figures she bought every self-help book on the market. She felt sure that if she just found the right diet, if she just hired the right trainer, she'd lose weight and reclaim her tennis career.
Instead Seles would gain it back as quickly as she dropped it, sneaking off on late-night supermarket runs and bingeing on junk food in secret. Seeking refuge from the pain and confusion of dual tragedies, she put on more than 35 pounds.
"When I started on this journey, I had all the diet books, I knew what to do, I worked with the famous trainers," Seles said in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday. "But yet I couldn't get it."
Now the 35-year-old Seles has written a book of her own: "Getting a Grip on My Body, My Mind, My Self" will be released Tuesday. It's technically a memoir, chronicling her rise from a tennis-loving kid in the former Yugoslavia to the No. 1 player in the world.
But she hopes it can also be the book she needed to read in her darkest days and never did, a lesson in conquering the demons of food without that dreaded word diet.
"I've tried every single one of them; I could recite them for you sitting here," Seles said. "But until I realized that I held that power — not my trainer, not my coach, not my family, but me — that's when I think I started to shift in the way I thought."
In April 1993, Seles was 19 years old and had already won nine Grand Slam titles. Her whole world made sense: hard work transformed into victory on the tennis court, the support of her family at home.
That life shattered in a second during a match in Hamburg, Germany, when Seles was stabbed by a spectator. Weeks later, her father was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1998 after a long battle with the disease.
Seles returned to tennis and won one more Grand Slam, the 1996 Australian Open. But her mind and body weren't the same. It took her more than nine years, her weight and emotions constantly yo-yoing, before she fully grasped the connection between the two.
