Tennis great Monica Seles on binge eating: "I was so ashamed"

She lived in the spotlight as one of the top tennis players in the world — but Monica Seles suffered privately for more than a decade before speaking out about binge eating. (NBC NewsWire/Getty Images)

Tennis champion Monica Seles won nine Grand Slam competitions and 53 singles titles before her 2008 retirement. And during much of that time, she was also privately struggling with binge eating disorder, she revealed during a Tuesday morning interview with Good Morning America. 

“For me when I was in stressful situations on the tennis court or in my personal life, I would start my binge eating,” she told Good Morning America’s Lara Spencer. “My trigger foods were pretzels, potato chips — and I would do it alone, because I was so ashamed.”

Seles on the court in 1995. (Photo: Getty Images) 

Monica Seles is the face of a new public service campaign about binge eating disorder, which affects an estimated 2.8 million Americans. “I wanted to let people out there who struggle from binge eating disorder know they’re not alone,” she said in the interview with Spencer. “I look at my life and how many years I wasted being shamed about it, hiding it from my family and friends and doing my binges in private.”

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The tennis star’s experiences echo those experienced by many people with eating disorders, experts tell Yahoo Health. Secretive eating, for example, is very common among those with binge eating disorder, says Jennifer Shapiro, PhD, a San Diego-based eating disorder specialist and licensed clinical psychologist. “We all tend to overeat at times,” she says. “Binge eating is more of eating an unusually large amount of food that other people would probably consider large in that same context, and you feel like you’re out of control and can’t stop.” People with binge eating disorder also tend to feel guilty or disgusted after binges, she adds.

“Everybody can have a bad day and take that pint of Ben and Jerry’s and put a spoon to it, but that doesn’t mean you have binge eating disorder,” says Lynn Grefe, president and CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association. “Binge eating disorder would be that you do this all the time, you do it privately, and you are embarrassed and ashamed of yourself after you do it.”

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In her 2009 autobiography Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self, Seles reveals that her binge eating began following a knife attack during a tennis tournament when she was 19. In the middle of a match against Steffi Graf, a deranged fan of Graf’s stabbed Seles in the back; she took a two-year break from competition and was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Seles’ 1993 on-court stabbing made headlines worldwide. Here, the cover of the New York Daily News. (Photo: Getty Images)

“I required a lot of comfort and found plenty of it in pints of ice cream and greasy bags of chips,” Seles, 41, writes in Getting a Grip. “How else could I numb my anger over being knocked down — literally — at the pinnacle of my career, through no fault of my own?”

Seles’s story parallels what many other people with eating disorders go through. “You’re not born with an eating disorder, but you’re born with certain vulnerabilities, whether it’s anxiety or depression or obsessive-compulsive tendencies,” Grefe tells Yahoo Health. “And so if you have one of those and then certain things in your life happen to trigger that vulnerability, then it can end up as an eating disorder.”

Seles told Good Morning America that she decided to seek help when a friend asked her to be a bridesmaid, but she had to go in for one dress fitting after another because her weight kept fluctuating. “So for me that came a point where I said, ‘There’s more to life than this. And I — and I need to get help.’”

In addition to her work with the public service campaign, Seles is also a spokesperson for Shire Pharmaceuticals, who produce the first drug approved to treat binge eating disorder, Vyvanse.

If you think you may have binge eating disorder, Grefe encourages calling the National Eating Disorder Association's help line at 800-931-2237 to be connected to treatment options.

"I suggest always going to somebody who specializes in eating disorders, because eating disorders have medical complications and can be dangerous and even deadly," Shapiro says. "Often times people don’t want to share this with friends or family members, and they’re embarrassed about it, so speaking with someone who understands eating disorders would be really important."