Athletes too are at risk of developing eating disorders such as anorexia

Eating Disorders: Athletes at Risk

Eating disorders are a group of conditions that are characterized by a pathological concern with body weight and shape. They are primarily psychological disorders, but they involve nutrition-related behaviors and complications. Athletes are under extreme pressure to achieve and maintain a body weight that optimizes performance.

Failure to meet weight-loss goals may have serious consequences, such as being cut from a team or restricted from competition. This pressure may cause some athletes to follow strict diets and maintain body weights that are not healthy.

This, combined with the selfmotivation and discipline that characterizes successful athletes, makes many athletes vulnerable to eating disorders. Eating disorders are more common in female athletes than in male ones. They are more common in sports where leanness or low body weight are expected or are an advantage, such as ballet, gymnastics, track and field, cycling, crew, wrestling, and horse racing.

Athletes with Anorexia

One type of eating disorder that may occur among athletes is anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is characterized by the loss of 15% or more of body weight. Weight is lost by restricting food intake and using behaviors such as vomiting after eating, abuse of laxatives, and excessive exercise to eliminate or use up calories.

People with anorexia are generally very secretive about their eating behaviors. An athlete’s regimented schedule makes it easy for him or her to use training diets and timetables, travel, or competition as an excuse not to eat normally. Over time, continued starvation leads to serious health problems, as well as a decline in athletic performance.

Starvation can lead to abnormal heart rhythms, low blood pressure, and atrophy of the heart muscle. The lack of energy and nutrients means that activity and growth are not supported. Sleep disorders are also common in people with anorexia.

Binging and Purging: Bulimia

Among athletes, the eating disorder bulimia nervosa is more common than anorexia. It is characterized by a cycle of binging and purging. Binging is the rapid consumption of a large amount of food in a short amount of time. This is accompanied by feelings of guilt and shame. Purging refers to methods used to eliminate excess calories from the body. These include self-induced vomiting, misuse of laxatives and diuretics, and excessive dieting and exercise.

Bulimia may begin when an athlete is unable to stick to a restrictive diet, or because the hunger associated with a very lowcalorie diet leads to an episode of overeating. Those with bulimia are usually of normal or slightly higher than normal body weight. Most of the health complications associated with bulimia—including tooth decay from repeated vomiting and dangerous changes in body chemistry—are a result of the binge-purge cycle.

Compulsive Exercising

The use of compulsive exercise to control weight has been termed anorexia athletica. It has less to do with food than either anorexia or bulimia, but it is nonetheless considered an eating disorder. People with this disorder use extreme training as a way to purge calories. This behavior is easy to justify because it is a common belief that serious athletes can never work too hard or too long.

Compulsive exercisers will force themselves to exercise even when they don’t feel well and may miss social events in order to fulfill their exercise quota. They often calculate exercise goals based on how much they eat. They believe that any break in training will cause them to gain weight and their performance to suffer. Compulsive exercise can lead to more serious eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia. It also may bring on severe health problems, including kidney failure, heart attack, and death.

1. Eating disorders must not control your life
Don't be your eating disorder, be your true self An eating disorder can be a quick identity. You may feel it distinguishes you and makes you special. You may fe...

2. Dieting may trigger dangerous eating disorders
All eating disorders are related to one another through excessive dieting, poor self-esteem, and negative feelings. That starts it. But eating disorders take on a li...

3. Eating disorders do not allow you to love your body
Normally, a teen's body changes in size, shape, structure, and chemistry. A girl shoots up. She rounds out, spreads, and softens. These physical changes do not occur al...

4. How to talk to teens with eating disorders
Teens often do not reason, and often, one cannot reason with them. In developmental terms, only the brightest adolescents are moving forward into "formal operational th...

5. Recover from an eating disorder by knowing your inner self
Eating disorders and your spiritual self The character of Harry Potter touches a cultural nerve. His story and all such fiction built around knights and wizards...

6. Girls mastering their environments beat eating disorders
In order for a girl to reach her potential, her developing self must know that it can master its environment outside the family. She has to feel that her options are ...

7. How eating disorders affect couples
Eating disorder and partnership Researchers are now looking more closely at the dynamics of couples in which one partner has an eating disorder, and this scruti...