Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement
6B
Student athetes’ silent struggle 
with eating disorders 
A

mong student athletes, there’s 
a fine line between being 
mindful of your health and 

becoming obsessed with it.

“Take care of your body,” motivational 

speaker Jim Rohn writes. “It is the only 
place you have to live.”

Despite the changes wrought by 

puberty, aging and disease, the body 
is singularly constant. To some extent, 
we feel we should be able to control the 
functions, size and abilities of our body. 
It is somehow both us and beyond us — 
ours but not always ours to control.

Athletes, 
whose 
identities 
are 

often directly tied to the capacities of 
their bodies, experience particularly 
powerful 
and 
complex 
mind-body 

relationships. In sports where a specific 
bodily aesthetic is tied to an athlete’s 
ability to perform — gymnastics, for 
instance, or wrestling — participants 
are much more likely to suffer from 
poor body image and dysfunctional 
eating.

I was a competitive Irish dancer 

for 10 years, and while I never had an 
eating disorder, I understand what it is 
like to desperately want your body to be 
able to do something. There’s a sense of 
frustration I think most athletes have 
experienced — anger, not at yourself 
exactly, but at your body’s refusal 
to cooperate with your ambition. I 
see how that exasperation, under 
certain circumstances, could twist 
the commitment to a sport into an all-
consuming quest for the unattainable.

The 
general, 
non-student-athlete 

population of college students is already 
at an increased risk of developing an 
eating disorder. Transitional periods 
are recognized as especially vulnerable 
times for the development of disordered 
eating. For most students, the freedoms 
and rhythms of college present a radical 
difference from the prescribed routines 

they have lived within for the first 18 
years of life. In an unfamiliar place, 
surrounded 
by 
strangers, 
students 

may feel their eating habits are the 
one aspect of their lives over which 
they have control. A desire to fit in 
— combined with fears about the 
mythical “Freshman Fifteen” — can 
also contribute to an emerging eating 
disorder. Among student athletes, these 
concerns intersect with the pressures 
of staying competitive in their sport.

There are many misconceptions and 

myths about eating disorders, partially 
due to the influence of inaccurate 
media portrayals. Here is some basic 
information.

People who suffer from anorexia 

nervosa do not eat a healthy quantity 
of food due to a serious psychological 
fear of gaining weight. They often 
rapidly lose weight and do not maintain 
sufficient body fat. Anorexia can also 
lead to other serious medical issues, 
including osteoporosis, cardiac arrest 
and even death. 

People 
with 
bulimia 
nervosa 

attempt to reduce calorie absorption 
by throwing up or abusing laxatives, 
and some sufferers may binge — eating 
excess amounts of food — before 
purging. People who frequently binge 
on food and do not purge have binge 
eating disorder.

Orthorexia, which is not formally 

recognized by most psychiatrists, is an 
uncontrollable obsession with healthy 
eating.

Though 30 years of made-for-TV 

movies argue otherwise, young, thin, 
wealthy white teenagers are not the only 
sufferers. A person of any age, gender, 
ethnicity, sexual orientation, weight and 
socioeconomic status can have an eating 
disorder.

A 2009 study found about 18 percent 

of 
students 
reported 
behaviors 

associated with an eating disorder 
in 2005 and 2007. A 1999 study found 
one-third of NCAA Division I female 
student athletes reported behavior that 
categorize them as at risk for anorexia.

While most colleges and universities 

have resources for students struggling 
with eating disorders, these programs 
are not always well-publicized.

LSA senior Julia McMahon, program 

assistant at the Body Image and 
Eating Disorder Program of Wolverine 
Wellness, explained students often 
enter college with concerns about 
gaining weight.

“I 
was 
an 
orientation 
leader,” 

McMahon said. “A lot of people are 
scared about, ‘How will I eat in the 

dining halls?’ and the Freshman Fifteen 
and other food- and body-oriented 
things.”

Though representatives of M-Dining 

speak to incoming students about 
dietary restrictions during orientation, 
eating disorders are not covered.

“It’s not a priority of the University to 

talk about those things,” said McMahon. 
She thinks this oversight may be due to 
time constraints, because orientation 
is only two days. Additionally, the 
complexity of these issues makes them 
hard to address in a short presentation.

LSA junior Celia Gold trains at 

Ann Arbor’s Wolverine Strength and 
Conditioning — a gym that specializes 
in CrossFit, a high-intensity fitness 
program. Gold said being an athlete has 
always been a big part of her identity. 
Beginning in elementary school, she 
participated in softball, soccer and 
basketball, and she stuck with lacrosse 
and cheerleading through high school. 
But as her passion for sports blossomed, 
so did her self-consciousness.

“I tried Weight Watchers when I 

was 12,” she explained. “As a girl, I was 
always self-conscious about my body 
and all I cared about was being skinny.”

Her high school coaches weren’t 

particularly helpful in promoting a 
healthy attitude toward exercise and 
nutrition.

“In 
high 
school, 
especially 
in 

cheerleading and lacrosse, I don’t 
feel there was ever an emphasis on it 
(nutrition),” she said. “I wish I knew 
then what I know now about food and 
fuel.”

Gold’s relationship with her body 

suddenly changed during her junior 
year of high school, when she started 
CrossFit.

“I would really restrict calories,” 

explained Gold. “My mom knew how 
obsessed with working out I was and 
she started doing CrossFit and brought 
me into that. That was the first time I 
saw working out as a performance thing 
and not an aesthetic thing.”

Gold 
didn’t 
just 
enjoy 
CrossFit 

and weightlifting, she also showed 
exceptional 
talent 
for 
both. 
Four 

years later, her hometown coach from 
CrossFit RedZone in Newtown, Conn., 
is still training her. Gold regularly 
enters both the CrossFit Games and 
weightlifting 
competitions, 
most 

recently for Team USA at the 2018 Pan 
American Junior Championships in 
Colombia.

“For me, I feel like CrossFit was the 

first time I admired what my body could 
do versus what it looked like. That was 

really huge for me,” explained Gold.

Gold, emphasized the importance of 

fellowship when it comes to promoting 
healthy eating habits among young 
student-athletes.

“It’s cool to have a community of 

strong girls emerging from the CrossFit 
and weightlifting world,” she said.

It is a generous and admirable thing 

to devote yourself wholly to an athletic 
pursuit the way Gold does, to spend your 
days pushing outward the boundaries 
of your abilities. The challenge — one 
that Gold, like many athletes, once 
struggled with — lies in preventing that 
dedication from turning into something 
darker. How easily tenacity can sour, 
morphing into a compulsive desire for 
complete dominance over one’s body.

The 
high 
prevalence 
of 
eating 

disorders and poor body image among 
student-athletes is not the kind of 
problem that can be traced to a single 
source of malevolence or systemic 
dysfunction. It is far more complicated 
than that — a Gordian knot of societal 
expectations, genetic predisposition, 
ambition and intimate social influences.

Some solutions are obvious. Coaches, 

for example, should be better educated 
to promote a healthy attitude toward 
exercise and nutrition and better 
equipped to intervene when one of their 
athletes presents signs of an eating 
disorder. But much of the issue feels 
frustratingly nebulous, its many layers 
presenting a unique challenge.

Perhaps the first stop-gap measure 

to creating a culture where eating 
disorders are less common is to begin 
meeting our own bodies with kindness, 
in the hope that it strengthens our 
resolve to treat others’ bodies with 
an unconditional respect. This is no 
easy task for anyone, of course, and 
for athletes it is especially tricky. It is 
difficult enough to locate the division 
between healthy zeal and sickness; it is 
quite another to resist crossing it when 
your culture, coaches, teammates and 
personal goals all seem to suggest you 
might benefit from doing so. But before 
the glory and after the disappointments, 
there must be a middle ground: fervor 
without agony, gusto tempered by self-
empathy.

The poet Mary Oliver writes, “As 

for the body, it is solid and strong and 
curious and full of detail: it wants to 
polish itself; it wants to love another 
body; it is the only vessel in the world 
that can hold, in a mix of power and 
sweetness: 
words, 
song, 
gesture, 

passion, ideas, ingenuity, devotion, 
merriment, vanity, and virtue.”

BY MIRIAM FRANCISCO, 

DAILY ARTS WRITER

File Photo/Daily

