As a two-sport varsity athlete from a fitness-oriented family, Sarah Eppley ’14 never thought she’d have an eating disorder. But in the fall of her sophomore year, she was swimming for two hours a day on a breakfast of Greek yogurt, no lunch and a handful of almonds with coffee before practice.
One year later, her teammate Laura Fitzgerald ’14 frequently felt dizzy after workouts in the pool. She was swimming on roughly 600 calories a day: a breakfast of cereal and a cup of vegetables for lunch.
Eating disorders are attributed to an interplay between biological, psychological and cultural factors, and it’s widely accepted that sports in which leanness is a benefit, either for performance or aesthetics, create high risk environments. According to the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), endurance sports in which athletes compete individually tend to see a greater number of eating disorders. Of the varsity sports offered at the college, running (track and field and cross country) and swimming both make the NEDA’s list.
The relationship between athletics and disordered eating, however, is complex. For both Eppley and Fitzgerald, restricted eating began in earnest as a response to anxiety, not out of a desire to improve racing times. With no external cause to link to symptoms like her racing heart, Fitzgerald began fixating on body image after the competitive season ended in her sophomore year, a time when swimmers’ appetites are still adjusting to the decrease in physical activity. For Eppley, a small weight gain over the course of her first year prompted dieting and an intense exercise regimen during the summer months, which was exacerbated in the fall with the return to the stresses of college life.
“In my mind, you can’t separate anxiety from anorexia,” Eppley said. “That’s what completely controlled it. Anxiety around food, and thoughts of food, and counting calories completely took over my life. Every second I was thinking about what I’d eaten up to that point and what I was going to eat later on.”
For Ella*, however, fixating on food has always been tied to lowering running times. Diagnosed with anorexia as a 10-year-old, she says she still sometimes feels that losing ten to fifteen pounds would make her a better athlete.
“It’s hard for me, knowing that I have so much discipline when it comes to schoolwork, feeling like when it comes to food that if I cared about my running enough, I’d force myself not to eat [certain foods],” Ella said. “When I don’t [restrict food intake …] I feel like I’m not doing everything I could be doing to be the best athlete I could be.”
While none of the student athletes interviewed reported pressure from coaching staff to lose weight, all noted a general lack of discussion on disordered eating. Despite noticeable drops in weight, neither Eppley nor Fitzgerald recall conversations with trainers, coaches or team captains addressing the topic.
“No one asked any questions, coaches didn’t ask any questions,” Eppley said. “One of my coaches even said, ‘Wow, you look really great’ when I was wearing a suit […] but another one said jokingly, ‘Oh, I need to take you to Nifty [Fifty’s Diner] and get you a milkshake.’ They may have thought something was up but they didn’t actually want to bring it up.”
In head swim coach Sue Davis’s experience, directly addressing noticeable changes in athletes’ bodies is usually unproductive, as students struggling with eating disorders often won’t admit they’re experiencing a problem.
“The result of approaching someone you think has an eating disorder can go in a positive direction or a negative direction,” she said. “My experience has told me that most people with an eating disorder will hide it from you or positively deny it when asked.”
Group conversations, which offer a more indirect method of disseminating information and expressing concern over attitudes towards food and nutrition, present their own challenges. Last spring, a concerned upperclassman on the women’s track team contacted Director of Worth Health Center Beth Kotarski to lead a presentation on nutrition and healthy eating habits. The presentation, however, only accentuated clashing perspectives on the importance of weight monitoring.
“I remember our fastest runner pushing back [on the idea that you don’t need to be skinny to be fast …] and for me that was the biggest takeaway,” Zoe Cina-Sklar ’15, a member of the women’s track and cross country teams, said. “Even though there was a person talking to us about the importance of eating what we want to eat and giving sustenance to our bodies, this person who everyone wanted to emulate in terms of running was saying ‘well, what you’re saying isn’t totally valid.’”
Cina-Sklar believes that five runners on the cross country team have struggled or are currently struggling with disordered eating, making it a difficult topic to address without generating a negative emotional response. For Eppley, who was beginning to regain control of her eating habits, the presentation itself was triggering.
“The meeting hit me hard, and for the next few weeks I really struggled with anxiety surrounding eating,” Eppley said in an e-mail. “I was definitely put off by the meeting […] and the only reason I can point to is that it simply made me aware of my own past eating disorder and my anxiety around food.”
Although Cina-Sklar believes that dominant attitudes on the team towards weight and nutrition have shifted for the better in the last two years, athletes who maintain that low weight is essential for strong performances on the track can easily find statistics to support their views. When Betsy*, a runner for both cross-country and track, met with me before her Conference race two weeks ago, she was one pound away from her “ideal racing weight” — 121 pounds — which she calculated from various sources on the web and the help of nutrition specialist Debbie Westerling.
“I read online that you get 2 seconds faster per mile for every pound you lose unless you’re underweight, so long as you’re losing weight within the normal range,” Betsy said when explaining the rationale for her self-imposed twice-a-day weigh-ins.
While playing the numbers game can be done safely by some, it often provides dangerous justification for others. Fitzgerald achieved a summer weight goal of 108 pounds — the lowest number within the “normal range” of the Body Mass Index — only after an extended period of restricted eating and daily purging.
“In my mind, I thought that nobody could say I’m unhealthy or try to stop me if I’m still in the normal range,” Fitzgerald said. “But the thing is, I’m not meant to be 108 pounds […] regardless if that’s in the normal range, for me it’s not healthy.”
For Fitzgerald, as well as the seven other student-athletes interviewed, a love for athletics frequently motivated a desire to change eating habits for the better. After noticing detrimental impacts on racing times and workout capacity, both Eppley and Fitzgerald resolved to increase their food intake for the sake of their swimming.
“I really wanted to go into this season approaching swimming as a reason to eat properly,” Fitzgerald said. “It hasn’t been a weight loss thing. I think it was easier to think like that when I was out of season, but now it’s really about the team. Being on the team is really important to me and I really love my teammates, so I want to be able to swim […] so that’s been something I’ve been trying to use as motivation.”
For Ella, however, the relationship between food and athletics still remains complicated.
“This probably sounds like an awful thing to say, but I almost wish maybe there was a little more pressure on us to be thin,” Ella said. “Maybe that would make us a little more competitive.”
Next week’s installment will look at treatment and recovery.
* This student chose to remain anonymous
