I thoroughly enjoy the work I do in helping motivate and empower young girls to celebrate and love their natural selves.

I struggled with self-esteem issues as a young girl, and it was not until my gymnastics career was completed in 2000 that I realized my accomplishments would not have been possible without my type of body, and I finally started to appreciate and celebrate myself.

That's a problem, when a young girl is looking in the mirror she's seeing a distorted image. That's because of this narrow definition of beauty that's portrayed daily, constantly, on television. She is not seeing the beauty and the strength that we may see.

I love athletics. As an athlete, I like to believe I can still do the things I used to do when I was once young.

I found through research that between 50 and 70 percent of young girls who describe themselves as overweight are actually of normal weight.

Gymnastics is the greatest sport in the world, and one of the hardest, but we have to watch out for domineering male figures who try to belittle and scream at young girls.