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