Dual sporting star Erin Phillips has opened up on her body image challenges, telling ABC News Breakfast she went through a "really dark time" during the peak of her athletic career. “I was reverting to diet pills, and I wasn’t eating properly,” she told Catherine Murphy. Phillips, who won three AFLW premierships with the Adelaide Crows, and was co-captain of the silver-medal winning Australian basketball team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, said she became "fixated on her body" despite being "super strong". "I remember standing in front of a mirror (as a teenager) and just wishing I could cut my stomach off with scissors," the 39-year-old said. Phillips' body image issues are documented in her biography Inside and Out, written with Samantha Lane and published two years after her retirement from AFLW as a two-time league best and fairest. In the book, the Order of Australia medallist describes being plagued by negative feelings about her body from her teenage years onward. "I had what I now see as an unhealthy fixation on my 'big legs', my 'puppy fat' and my 'pot-belly stomach' — but I’d clearly learnt those terms from somewhere," Phillips writes. Phillips pinpoints one thing as the "catalyst" for her body-image problems: "the skin-tight, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination Opals bodysuit uniform" which became synonymous with the Australian team for a period of time. "I was super self-conscious wearing that uniform,” the two-time WNBA champion told the ABC. "Everything was so centralised around my stomach and wanting to have flat abs. "I remember thinking all my issues in life would go away [if I could fix my stomach]. "I had a terrible time." Phillips' biography also takes aim at the practice of skinfold testing, describing the damage to her and teammates' self-esteem as "lasting". "The monitoring was presented to us as being part of the best high-performance practice, but in my experience the ramifications were frightening for young women and their sense of body image," she writes. "In this period, I’d have done anything to play for Australia, even if that meant taking extreme measures, including over-training and under-eating to the point of exhaustion. Inside and Out describes Phillips' growing obsession with her skinfold numbers, leading to the incident in front of the mirror. "I used to stand in front of that wardrobe mirror and pinch myself in the exact places that my skinfold test pinched me, criticising myself intensely," she writes. "I thought that if I could just cut my stomach, someone would have to sew it back together, and then they could tuck it at the same time. "I must have only been 16 at the time, but I had these thoughts on countless more occasions beyond that. Appreciating 'what I can do' Phillips told the ABC she was eventually able to move forward by "appreciating my body for what I can do, rather than what it looks like". "It’s important for people to know that nobody’s immune to the different challenges we go through," she said. "It doesn’t matter how successful you are, or what you’ve done." Asked if she had any advice for women and girls experiencing something similar, Phillips said it was important to focus on "how amazing our bodies are. "We’re custom made, right? So nothing should look the same. We have incredible bodies. We’re all shapes and sizes, and we’re beautiful. "The more I learned about my body and what it can do, the more I became aware of how amazing the human body is… and I wanted to feel good for me, not anybody else." After nine seasons in the WNBA, including a gold medal at the 2006 World Championships, Phillips has recently returned to the court with NBL1 club Woodville Warriors. In her first game for the club, Phillips had eight rebounds, six assists and three steals to go with four points. She has also taken on an off-field role with the club, as a mentor in the club’s Junior Pathway Program.