injured, Béla didn't want to see it. ... You had to deal with it. I was intimidated. He looked down on me. He was six-feet something, and I was four-foot nothing." Károlyi was also said to strictly monitor his gymnasts' food intake: Moceanu, for instance, stated that at meets away from home, gymnasts were limited to consuming as few as 900 Calories a day. Even Károlyi's supporters have admitted that at certain competitions, his gymnasts ate so sparingly that members of the men's gymnastics team smuggled food to them in their hotel rooms. However, many of Károlyi's most prominent gymnasts have vehemently defended him against these allegations. Nadia Comăneci, in her 2004 memoir Letters to a Young Gymnast, remarked that she literally trusted Károlyi with her life. She also stated that in Romania, the gymnasts at Károlyi's school consumed well-balanced diets and, in fact, ate better than most other civilians in the country at the time. Olympic medalists and Károlyi gymnasts Mary Lou Retton, Phoebe Mills and Kim Zmeskal, among others, have also praised Károlyi and his training regimen. A number of former Károlyi gymnasts, both supporters and detractors, have acknowledged that some of the allegations about Károlyi were true, but have also claimed that the ends—medals—justified the means. In Joan Ryan's 1995 Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, 1992 Olympian Betty Okino said: "What Béla did worked. He motivated me by getting me mad." Some have claimed that Károlyi stopped treating gymnasts harshly when parents directly requested that he do so. In a column she wrote rebutting many of the claims of Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, Okino wrote: "Károlyi structured his training in a way that built your physical and mental strength to such a remarkable level that even he couldn't tear you down. Béla wanted to know that when push came to shove, his athletes could handle any situation thrown at them." In an interview in the edition of December 8, 2007 of the Romanian newspaper Evenimentul Zilei, Adrian Goreac, the coach of the Romanian national gymnastics team from 1981 to 1990, after Károlyi left, spoke of Károlyi's "dictatorial regime" during his time coaching the Romanian gymnastics team. In November 2008, Emilia Eberle, a Romanian national team member during the Károlyi coaching era, gave an interview to KCRA-TV in Sacramento, California, claiming that while she was on the national team, both Béla and Márta Károlyi regularly beat her