“It was mentioned to me by somebody superior that if I was really trying, I would stick my finger down my throat.” -Kirsten Moore-Towers, 2014 Olympic silver medallist
The pressure to succeed in sport can be an overwhelming. Glory may follow success but the pursuit can also manifest serious and lasting damage in athletes. An eating disorder can be responsible for that harm. While 1 – 5% of the general population develop an eating disorder, the prevalence in some elite sports is over 30%. Sports that are particularly plagued are those that contain not just an athletic quality but an aesthetic one as well, such as figure skating, diving and gymnastics. Long distance running also has high numbers as extreme leanness has often been portrayed as the ideal body type.
The TSN Originals feature, Disorder, examines eating disorders in sports through the lens of athletes who have experienced the struggle firsthand. The feature uncovers systemic problems that call for a cultural shift. Athletes are known to have type A personalities. They can be driven to the extreme. When this is compounded with pressure to fit a certain mold, it’s a dangerous mix, especially when this message is delivered by those in positions of authority such as coaches, judges or even parents. Eating disorders can be fatal and have ended too many young lives.
The athletes and experts interviewed for the feature were incredibly candid and shared more than could be included in the final cut. In the interest of continuing this vital conversation, these topics were also discussed.
How can you recognize that someone may have an eating disorder?
Figure skater Kirsten Moore-Towers had this to say: “Pay attention to people and where they go after they’re eating. If they stop eating every so often to run to the bathroom or do whatever, or maybe they’re going to the bathroom and they run the shower, you know that they’re not needing to take a shower. People I think tend to become withdrawn and a little bit less honest, they maybe start lying or being untruthful about things that don’t necessarily matter in order to weave this big web of something that makes sense so you can hide this other big thing that you don’t want your friends to know about."
Clinical therapist Kyla Fox believes looking for significant emotional changes and asking questions is important: “Are they more negative? Are they connecting to their peer group? Do they want to do the things that they’ve always wanted to do? Do they feel happy? Are they isolating? Are they hanging out with a different kind of crowd? What are they getting into? Do you know anything going on with that person? Do you know anything going on with that person in your family who you live with every day? I think it is the emotional well-being of people that really is the stuff we overlook a lot, so I think there’s a really strong need to have conversations and emotional sharing in relationships so that we can get to some of the roots of where people are being affected and not focusing solely on what they’re eating and not eating.”
What is it like inside the mind of someone with an eating disorder?
No two eating disorders are the same, but they usually do have some things in common. Kyla Fox offers insight, not just as a clinical therapist and the founder of an eating disorder recovery centre, but as a former anorexic as well: “I had to obey every rule and regiment that my eating disorder told me I needed to follow and my life became smaller and smaller and smaller as my body became smaller and smaller and smaller... I had no control. I had no agency, I had no sense of autonomy, I was completely ravaged by this... A day would just sort of involve a particular amount of time that I had to exercise... I never starved myself entirely, which I think is a myth about anorexia, but I only ate very specific things at very specific times. Any diversion from that would be completely not allowed... I had to weigh myself at certain times in certain ways, I had to try things on this many times to make sure that it felt like it fit the right way.”
Figure skating choreographer Julie Marcotte also battled body image issues during her career as an ice dancer: “It’s really slow and it’s gradual and you don’t really see it happen until you start to overeat and you feel extreme guilt and you say to yourself, okay, it was just a one-time deal, and tomorrow, everything’s going to be fine again. It’s a pattern that just repeats itself, and it gets worse and worse and worse... even when you’re spiralling down and you’re miserable and every day it’s suffering, you're still fighting for it because this [sport] is where your identity is and this is what you’re good at, so this is where you believe you belong and you don’t see it, you don’t see past it."
What impact can the pandemic have on athletes with eating disorders?
Rachael Flatt is a former US figure skating champion. She never suffered with an eating disorder, but she was the target of many negative comments about her body when she competed. Today, she is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology and has studied the early impacts of COVID-19 on eating disorder symptoms: “For folks who have binge type disorders like binge eating and bulimia nervosa, typically, those binge type symptoms are being exacerbated... It certainly makes sense in that those tend to be coping mechanisms in times of stress or a lot of negative emotion.
"For many of these athletes, their sport is their job, and to not have that is obviously a real challenge. We know that with those types of changes and the lack of consistency, it really makes the eating disorder become even more pervasive. For folks who have an eating disorder quite often, they’re spending a lot of time thinking about their weight, thinking about their shape, thinking about their meals, and if you’re no longer training, then that space has to be filled up by something else. Well, the eating disorder is probably going to move right in and so it’s really important that they get immediate resources on the spot."
Contributions from Disorder producer Tracy Britnell
