Recovering addict Shawn Johnson opted out of taking narcotic pain medications after giving birth to her and husband Andrew East’s third child because she was fearful of falling back into old habits.
“Third c-section was definitely the hardest but smoothest (if that’s possible HA),” the Olympic gymnast, 31, shared during a Q&A via her Instagram Stories Friday.
She then added, “Feeling great now though. I also refuse all pain meds haha (they make me SO sick and frankly after being addicted to adderall it just scares me so I don’t even mes [sic] with it.”
Johnson’s followers were shocked she did not take any drugs after her Cesarean delivery, especially since she also shared doctors had to cut out “so much scar tissue.”
The mom of three replied that she took Tylenol and Motrin to help ease her aches and pains.
Johnson then delve further into her addiction history, sharing with her followers that it began after she was prescribed pills by a “not good doctor” to curb her appetite and give her more energy.
“Fast forward 7 years of being heavily addicted to it and having it control me, when I finally freed myself of it I swore anything even remotely addictive I’d stay away from,” she wrote over an image of her in a hospital bed after welcoming her baby.
“It affected every part of my life and changed who I was. I never want to feel out of control like that again.”
Johnson previously opened up about her pill usage in a video she posted on her YouTube channel in June 2020.
The athlete, who stands at 4-foot-11, said at the time that she turned to extreme methods to lose weight after she gained 15 pounds once she stopped training as a pro gymnast.
“I started taking weight-loss pills, I started taking ephedrine, I started taking Adderall,” she shared.
“I started doing anything and everything that I possibly could to lose weight and to look like I did at the Olympics.”
Johnson said her “dark kind of spiral” of taking medications to try and “spike” her metabolism lasted a few years.
She shared that in 2012 she hit another low point when she was training to make the Olympic team again that year and started taking “heavy doses of Adderall” again.
“I continued to compete into 2012, where I just started to get depressed, I think as a consequence and a side effect of Adderall,” the gold medalist said in the YouTube video, adding that she thought she was “overdosing” on the drug typically used to treat narcolepsy and ADHD.
Johnson shared she ultimately quit taking Adderall after she got pregnant following a heartbreaking miscarriage.
She said in her video, “There was something that switched when I got pregnant, where it was no longer about me or my body or the vanity or the calories, or what I looked liked or what I weighed.
“I could’ve cared less, it was about protecting my baby.”
Aside from their third baby, Barrett, who is just a few weeks old, Johnson and East, 32, also share a daughter Drew, 4, and son Jett, 2. The couple has been married since 2016.
