Wednesday, October 25, 2017 // The Statement
6B

worsens. And in those 

who are at particular risk, 
they’ll think, ‘Well, I need 
to lose more weight,” and it 
becomes a self-perpetuating 
spiral downwards of worsen-
ing physical condition.”

The second group of ath-

letes are those engaging in 
aesthetic sports where per-
formance is judged subjec-
tively. Dancers, gymnasts 
and figure skaters are com-
mon for this category of sus-
ceptibility.

“There’s no free-throw 

percentage or soccer goal 
being scored. You are per-
forming for a judge, and 
because it’s a performance 
where all eyes are on you, it 
increases the self-conscious-
ness of appearance and rais-
es your risk of developing an 
eating disorder,” Bravender 
explained.

The third group includes 

sports that divide its compet-
itors into weight classes like 
wrestling, judo and rowing. 
According to Bravender, this 
is a massive issue, in which 
athletes feel pressured to 
reduce to their lowest weight 
for competitive advantage. It 
wasn’t until multiple tragic 
deaths of collegiate wres-
tlers that the National Col-
legiate Athletic Association 
made regulations in 2012 
and has since, not observed 
any deaths from unhealthy 
weight cutting practices.

However, 
the 
tensions 

around body image and 
weight remain high among 
college athletes. The shield-
ed nature of the topic makes 
it particularly hard to speak 
about in competitive set-
tings.

“I think it came from the 

Type A nature that is Michi-
gan, that is Michigan sports, 
that is a Michigan student-
athlete. I definitely did not 
see it across my whole team, 
and I can only speak from my 
own experience that it start-
ed much earlier for me than 
rowing,” Carson said.

Carson’s 
sports 
career 

started with soccer and 
then cross-country, until she 
began rowing at the Univer-
sity.

“You can usually pick 

out a rower because they 

are significantly taller than 
other athletes and have 
strong, beautiful shoulders. 
I wouldn’t say that it was my 
sport involvement that lead 
to my desire to fit my desired 
body image that was smaller 
than what I was,” she said. “I 
think for me, it started much 
earlier. I had already had that 
mentality and the disordered 
frame of thinking.”

Nulf’s story shared simi-

lar elements of disorder and 
conformity. She traced the 
beginnings of her abnormal 
relationship with food to her 
earlier figure-skating career.

“I definitely had skating 

coaches who made com-
ments and put pressure on 
kids in our skating clubs to 
look a certain way and be a 
certain way,” she said.

At the beginning of high 

school, she began cross-
country and then dance. 
With the stress of col-
lege auditions for dance 
programs, 
the 
anorexia 

morphed 
into 
something 

else.

“That stress made me 

snap and I really started 
binge-eating, but to compen-
sate for that, I began bing-
ing and purging. It was a 
one-time thing, then it was 
a two-time thing, and then 
a once-a-week thing, until it 
progressed and progressed 
to 
a 
multiple-times-daily 

thing,” Nulf said.

When thinking about the 

heightened risk for eating 
disorders and disordered 
eating among athletes, I 
question my own habits. 
Maybe it’s something in the 
regimented 
training 
that 

permits this sort of body-
mind detachment to occur. 
I remember thinking my 
decisions around food were 
promoting my artistic career 
and therefore saw no nega-
tive consequence in strain-
ing my body — in fact, I was 
proud of my achievements 
in weight loss. However, the 
balance 
between 
perfor-

mance and body image is a 
constant, underlying current 
of tension.

“It’s a huge regret that I 

have,” Carson said. “In col-
lege, what my body looked 
like became more important 
than what my performance 
looked like. … I wanted to be 
the best athlete I could, but 
at that time, the disordered 
thoughts were stronger than 

my rational thoughts.”

Carson spoke about being 

clouded by her disordered 
thoughts that she had con-
vinced herself she was aiding 
her performance.

“I kept losing weight 

through my years, and my 
physical performance went 
down with my weight,” she 
said. “It’s hard for to look 
back at that time because 
I was putting my body 
through so much physical 
and emotional stress, all for 
what I now know was want-
ing to look a certain way.”

As a dancer of 19 years, 

this 
performance-versus-

body sacrifice is something 
that resonates deeply. Sonn-
eville explained this tug of 
war as a common pressure 
among young athletes.

“There is a real trade-off, 

in order to maintain a par-
ticular body type for some 
people is going to require 
disordered eating,” she said. 
“People who have a skill and 
ability in a sport will face a 
moment in their career that 
says, in order to maintain 
this body type, this is a real 
sacrifice I have to make — I 
cannot have both things.”

Sonneville 
emphasized 

the difficulty in this decision, 
especially 
when 
athletes 

are surrounded by people 
who praise them for their 
sport, have parents who have 
invested time and energy, or 
even a coach that reinforces 
unhealthy messages of eat-
ing.

She urges coaches to cul-

tivate a team culture that is 
a safe space. “A place where 
people 
disclose, 
a 
place 

where people are allowed 
to suffer and struggle,” she 
said. “I think you have to 
model vulnerability if you 
are in a position of authority. 
Be particularly mindful of 
who your athletes are, who 
your students are and what 
they’re at risk of.”

As a former U-M athlete, 

Carson reiterates the neces-
sity for fostering the right 
environment for students.

“Seeing help-seeking as 

a strength and not a weak-
ness — I think that’s some-
thing sports struggle with is 
viewing mental health as a 
weakness and it’s not,” Car-
son said. “At the end of the 
day, your mental health is 
more important than your 
physical performance. But 

when you’re in the culture 
of athletics, it doesn’t feel 
that way. Even when I was in 
that place, it didn’t feel that 
way: the team, the team, the 
team.”

However, there is exten-

sive work being done to 
better treat and prevent 
eating-related 
disorders 

among athletes. The NCAA 
has implemented various 
eating 
disorder 
research 

and prevention programs 
like The Female Athlete 
Body Project — an interac-
tive series of verbal, written 
and behavioral exercises to 
promote a healthier lifestyle 
and mindset. Carson stresses 
the importance of mental 
health and pushes for annual 
screenings earlier on in ath-
letes’ careers.

“I really think the ath-

letic department could better 
serve its athletes by allocat-
ing some more funding to 
this area,” Carson said. “I 
think that mental health, 
which includes eating dis-
orders, should be a bigger 
priority. Because without 
mental health, you can’t be a 
great student, a great athlete, 
a great friend, a great team-
mate.”

The urgency for better 

prevention and intervention 
is apparent. Eating disorders 
are a physical and mental 
problem in need of attention 
and appropriate care. It isn’t 
a diet pill or exercise plan you 
can unsubscribe to. It’s much 
more complex.

Sometimes 
I 
wonder 

what my body would be like 
without the scale under the 
piano and the traumatizing 
embarrassment of a target 
weight too far below the 
actual. I wonder if I wouldn’t 
have stopped growing and 
could’ve been taller like my 
brother. Sometimes I won-
der if sacrificing my health 
for my craft was worth it — 
and I still don’t have a clear 
answer.

So where do we being? 

How do we tackle this ill-
ness, this stigma, this fine 
balance between sacrifice 
and well-being?

“I’m hoping we are going 

towards a more holistic 
approach 
to 
prevention,” 

Sonneville said. “Right now, 
there’s a lot of money and 
research dedicated to obesity 
prevention and there’s this 
idea that this has to be dif-
ferent from eating disorder 
prevention. … We are work-
ing towards the same goal, 
but we get stuck in these silos 
with this messaging that is 
off-putting to the other field. 
If we are addressing obesity 
with the expense of increas-
ing weight stigma, body dis-
satisfaction and disordered 
eating, that’s a real prob-
lem.”

As a researcher, former 

athlete and subject of disor-
dered eating, Carson hopes 
to see greater efforts into 
redefining the face of eating 
disorders.

“Eating disorders are not 

about the size of your body, 
they’re about your thoughts. 
I think it’s really good for 
people to be aware of that 
— you may have friends and 
family members who may 
not look like what you see 
on a TV show, but it’s really 
not about your size or your 
BMI,” Carson said. “It’s 
about this obsessive thought 
process 
around 
food. 
I 

always thought I couldn’t 
have an eating disorder — 
I’m not small enough, I’m 
not thin enough. It’s not 
about that.”

Bravender 
pushes 
for 

eating disorders to be rec-
ognized as the medical con-
ditions they are.

“You can look at that as 

having a glass of wine with 
dinner is normal, but if the 
emphasis becomes so much 
on the drinking that you 
become an alcoholic, we treat 
that as an illness,” he said. 
“We don’t treat that as just an 
annoying behavior, there is 
something wrong that needs 
specific treatment.”

Like addiction, like any 

mental illness, eating disor-
ders and disordered eating 
should be treated the same 
way.

“The right thing to do is 

to get treated, just as if you 
had diabetes or cancer or a 
broken leg, you’d seek treat-
ment,” he said. “And there’s 
no stigma attached to those 
other medical issues, why 
should there be for eating 
disorders?”

BODY IMAGE
From Page 5B

ALEXIS RANKIN/Daily

Public Health professor Kendrin Sonneville and Public Health graduate Traci Carson