Elite Athletes Body Image Disordered Eating Struggles
From the age of 8 Matilda Friend chased a dream of becoming one of the world’s best ice dancers.
at her peak she and partner William Badaoui were ranked 55 in the world.
She was drawn to the glamour and uniqueness of the sport, but behind the sequins and smiles Friend was battling with her body image.
She often had negative thoughts around the way she looked compared to her competitors.
“Thay were just these tiny, petite, slim girls.I’m shorter and have more of a muscular body, and I compared myself to that,” Friend told ABC Sport.
“That was confronting for me to think ‘how can I make my body look like that?'”
As Matilda Friend started down the professional path the pressure to look a certain way crept in. (International Skating Union via Getty Images: On Man Kevin Lee)
Friend first felt the pressure at 11 years of age during a two-month training stint in Moscow.
“We would be in the change rooms and if a coach walked in the girls would shove their food under their bag to try and hide it,” she said.”It was something I could see was an expectation.”
From then on, she did what she could to appear smaller.
“Sometimes before training I would get bandages and wrap them around my body, under our tight little training dresses, which was my way of hiding what I thought was too big of a body,” she said.”I wanted to do the best that I could and get good scores, and I truly felt like that [appearance] was an influential part of the score at the end of the competition.”
It’s a common theme
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Friend is not alone.
ABC Sport, in partnership with Deakin University, has released the results of the Elite Athletes in Australian Women’s Sport Survey.
The survey’s aim was to shine a light on issues in Australian women’s sport and drive positive change.
152 elite athletes responded from 47 sports.
We found 27 per cent of respondents had negative feelings about their body image.
It was only when I went to a dietician that I realised how little food I was eating, and it wasn’t enough to train and compete to my full capacity.
The numbers from our survey are significantly more than research from the Butterfly Foundation, which suggests up to 17 per cent of Australians have an eating disorder or more than three symptoms of disordered eating.
Why athletes?
clinical psychologist Scott fatt was the lead researcher on Western Sydney University’s ASPIRE study which investigated how body image and eating disorder symptoms impact male and female elite athletes.
Out of 238 participants, it found almost 80 per cent were at risk of disordered eating.
Fatt says athletes experience body image in a different way to the general population.
Ther’s this idea of how they should look as a man or a woman. then there’s also this idea of how they should look as an athlete,” he said.
and sometimes those images do not line up.
A female athlete who’s a basketball player might need to be really strong [and] have a fair bit of muscle to be good at their sport,but then when they put on a dress and go out to a party,they might feel like having those muscles is not in line with how society says they should look.
So, there can be this conflict where they might feel comfortable in a certain surroundings, but then they feel uncomfortable in that other environment.
Elite Athletes Increasingly Reveal Struggles with Disordered Eating
Many high-performing athletes are now speaking out about their experiences with disordered eating, highlighting a problem that research indicates is more prevalent in sports than in the general population. australian track and field athlete Nicola Kawa recently shared her story, revealing she felt guilt about her eating habits even during off-seasons and was significantly under-fueling throughout her career.
Kawa stated, “It ebbed and flowed through seasons because sometimes when you stop the season, and you’re still eating like you’re in season, you feel guilty about it,” in an interview with ABC Sport.
She credited access to a national programme dietitian and strength and conditioning coaching with helping her realize the extent of her under-fueling.
Research published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine demonstrates that disordered eating is more common in athletes than the general population.
Dr. Michael Fatt, an expert on the issue, explained the contributing factors. “There’s something about athletes.They’re often vrey driven, they’ve often got very high standards, there’s a bit of perfectionism which we know can be linked with eating disorder symptoms,” he said. He also noted that the athletic environment often normalizes rigid exercise and eating behaviors.