With images like this bombarding us, who are already fixated on squeezing every last second out of ourselves in pursuit of a PR, it’s easy to see how so many of us are prone to ED. (Photo credit: iThinkergoiMac)
Are you or somebody you know a Type A+ Hard-worker+ Perfectionist+ People Pleaser+ Control Freak+ Long-Distance Runner? If so, then you or she is at high risk for running with an eating disorder.
Anorexia, bulimia and compulsive exercise are way too common among women athletes, especially runners. According to research, more than 1/3 of female college athletes have some type of disordered eating and between 2-3% have a full-fledged eating disorder. We’ve covered the topic of The Female Athlete Triad in past Salty posts, and we saw that the topic peaked some interest and hit close to home for some readers and me.
As most of you know I am recovering from my own battle with ED and today I want to continue the conversation about anorexia, bulimia and exercise addiction to help those readers who may be suffering.
According to this USA Today excerpt, addictive personalities tend to gravitate toward athletics. Kimiko Soldati, a 2004 Olympic diver who struggled with bulimia captured it best when she said “It would be hard to find a female athlete in the aesthetic sports — gymnastics, diving, cheerleading, figure skating, dancing — who isn’t preoccupied with body image and somewhat obsessive about what she is eating.” While running isn’t necessarily an aesthetic sport, I think this holds true for many of us too.
What drives runners to take such extreme measures in the first place? Do lighter athletes run faster? Temporarily, some might. This happened to me when I first started restricting a few months before the Cleveland marathon and ran my personal record there. But the intensive strain of running requires an ample flow of caloric fuel, and after the shock wears off , the body gets smart. The body will start eating away at muscle once little to no fat remains. Long-term effects of starvation start to set in, and running faster becomes a thing of the past. The body is an amazing thing, and it will shut down other functions to focus on the things that really matter: like keeping the heart beating. Long-term effects can be detrimental, placing extreme stress on the body, with imbalanced electrolyte and potassium levels for binge-purgers and supplemental low heart rates and irregular heart beats, which can be lethal. Luckily, once in recovery, most damage is reversible.
Recovery from full-fledged eating disorders can take years, and unfortunately, recovery is not an easy thing. According to Dr. David Rosen of the University of Michigan, eating disorders kill more people than all of the other mental illnesses combined, including depression.
Eating Disorders versus Disordered Eating
You might be thinking to yourself: this post is definitely not for me; I’ll never have an eating disorder. But, I encourage you to keep reading. Back in 2005, my behaviors started slowly, where I only ate certain types of food or exercised a bit more than usual. I thought nothing of it. Unfortunately, my motive to “lose just a pound or two” to run a little bit “faster” turned into a full-fledged eating disorder about six months later. The habits became intense and hard to break.
While losing a couple of pounds might make you faster in the short term, the long term effects of eating disorders and disordered eating will cause your performance and overall health to decline. (Photo credit: Jim Larson)
While not all disordered eating leads directly to an eating disorder (definitely not), almost all eating disorders start as disordered eating. For female runners, it’s a really fine line that can be straddled daily. Running, after all, leads to a lifestyle of focusing on health, including healthy food. When being conscious of healthy choices turns to an obsession, though, a problem may be on the horizon.
As eating disorder expert Patricia Kaminski of the University of North Texas says, “The more competitive people are, even if they’re just competitive with themselves, the more likely they are to have the kind of extremist thinking that can lead to disordered eating patterns. If running five miles is going to help me train well, then running 10 is better. If a 1,200-calorie diet is good to help me lose weight, then a 500-calorie diet must be great.” Have you ever battled with these type of thoughts?
Signs of Disordered Eating
From mild to extreme, disordered eating doesn’t mean you have a full-fledged problem; however, if taken to the extreme, a problem may start developing. Nip it in the bud! If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms (of course, I’m not a registered dietician or anything of the sorts…but my personal experience says…), please talk to someone!
- I’m always on or off a diet.
- I spend most of my day planning out my food.
- I make a lot of food for other people but will usually not allow myself to eat it.
- If I miss a work out, I feel like I can’t eat as much.
- I don’t trust myself around food.
- I know if I eat normally, I am going to gain weight.
- I get really anxious if I miss my usual run.
- I feel fat on a regular basis.
- I’ve cut out a lot of foods (starches, fats, sugars, carbs) in order to eat “healthy.” I stick to safe foods like fruits and veggies.
- I weigh myself daily, and the number determines my mood.
- I’m constantly thinking that I’m not thin enough.
“Safe” foods may include apples, rice cakes, celery or any low-caloric food groups. (Photo credit: @Doug88888)
It’s normal for both men and women to have occasional negative thoughts about their bodies. It becomes troublesome, though, when it gets obsessive and such thoughts rear their ugly head on a daily basis. When I’m not able to go out and pound some pavement, sometimes I still turn to the destructive behavior of restricting, especially when stress is high whether at school or at work.
The Stigma
It took me many years to truly admit that I had a problem. Such is the usual story of most people with eating disorders. We whisper about it and keep it hush hush; we rarely want to discuss it in public. We deny it. But, all too often, this dirty little secret is too close to home to female long-distance runners. More pro-athletes and public figures have come forward with such struggles as of late, in the hopes of raising awareness and erasing the stigma that eating disorders are self-inflicted and selfish. I think it’s working and am hopeful that this trend of striving for extreme thinness dissipates.
Have you or another runner you know suffered from an ED?
I am suffering from it now, and have been for years. I read your check-list, and I can check off at least 7 of the 11. Every day is a struggle. When I was a child, my parents allowed us to eat whatever we wanted. My older sister, who was “naturally” thin, could eat an entire box of peanut butter bars and a gallon of milk at one sitting and still maintain her size 3 figure. I would restrict fat or calories or food in general and wore a size 11. Now I am at a normal healthy weight (and have been for 10 years thanks to my running habit and penchant for “healthy” foods.) But it’s never enough. If I am being completely honest with myself and you- I am so afraid of going back to where I came from. I am always giving up something- be it sugar or dairy or gluten… and I never feel like I am going to get off this roller coaster. Whenever you think of someone who is suffering from this, you picture a super skinny girl who thinks she is fat. I am not super skinny, and I don’t think I’m fat. But I sure am afraid of going back to where I was.
I was about 15 lbs heavier and 3 sizes bigger before I started running and I sure as heck don’t want to go back there (other than during the post-partum period of course!) I prefer being a lean mean running machine. It’s what makes me happiest when it comes to my body. But it’s not just my weight or the size of clothes I can wear or my appearance. It’s so much more. I feel better when I’m lean. I feel more energetic, stronger, healthier and more like the me I was meant to be. I prefer it. So I too am motivated at times to continue exercising or watch what I eat to maintain the body I want. But I really don’t think that’s an intrinsically unhealthy attitude. That being said, I generally don’t obsess over food or count calories. I don’t really restrict at all, other than trying to eat as healthy as possible. If I do start counting calories I easily get sucked into obsessing about it, so I just don’t do it and trust that my lifestyle will take care of it. Maybe I could even get leaner that I do just from training and eating the way I want to, but it’s not worth the sacrifices and the risks of going into ED territory for me.
Sorry for rambling on, but I just wanted to say that I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying and that some of what you’re experiencing may be normal and some might be disordered. If it’s the latter, I hope you find the help you need to avoid the full blown ED! Thanks so much for being so honest and open about your struggles with body image!
Hi there!
I really appreciate your honesty in your post. It’s definitely a slippery slope and hard to catch it when you fall back into destructive behaviors. What has worked best for me is to keep regular appointments with a dietician (for the physical health) and therapist who specializes in eating disorders (for the mental health). Being honest with you and myself, I’m not the best at keeping regular appointments, especially when I think I’m doing just fine, but I know in my heart that they need to happen.
I totally understand your comment about stereotypes of eating disorders and not thinking you “look” sick enough to be classified as having one. I can tell you, though, when I was at my sickest, I wasn’t at my lowest weight. It was after several years of being in the behaviors, when my body started to rebel (ie metabolism slowed down and held onto every calorie it could), that the long-term effects really started to set in. My heart beat was abnormal, my electrolytes were imbalanced, my blood pressure was extremely low and I was beginning to form osteoperosis, all while being classified as “normal” according to the BMI scale.
I’ll be thinking of you and pulling for you.
Ginkgo recently posted..Real Runners Don’t Take Walk Breaks. Or Do They?
I can relate to many of these comments, although I find this one to be an especially important one–we need to be aware that those who are even at a “healthy” weight can suffer from eating disorders as well. Even at my lowest weight I couldn’t be considered “sick” enough physically to have an eating disorder, although the mental side of things were continuously going downhill.
Thanks so much for opening this topic up, Ginkgo! I feel that, while it’s a well-known fact that ED effects many distance runners (male and female), there isn’t always a friendly, healthy forum for discussion about it (especially from a first-person perspective). As someone who’s gone through the spectrum and who considers herself in full recovery, I’d just like to add that things do get better the longer you’re on the recovery wagon and that a few bumps in the road won’t completely derail you. The trick is to learn to identify your triggers and develop healthy coping mechanisms that work for you. Everyone is different, but for me, running itself can be a mental trigger. I’ve (thus far) been successful at warding off a backslide into ED behaviors, but sometimes I do backslide mentally if I let myself get too wrapped up in mileage numbers, pace numbers, route times, etc. If I start getting anxious about these things, I force myself to take a full rest day (or days) to regroup and get my head in order. Then I’ll leave the watch at home, run new routes where I don’t know the exact distance, and take a break from the training log until I feel relaxed again. I want to make sure that I’m always running for the right reasons :)
These are great suggestions, thanks for posting this!! :)
Rachael recently posted..Raw Food Journal Entry 113: A Message to Mom
Thanks for opening up and sharing your experiences. It must be tough, but you are doing a great thing by writing on this topic and serving as a role model on how someone can cope, focus on recovery and learn to love themselves. I have never suffered from an ED, but I have started down that path a few times–definitely could check off most items on that list above. Fortunately, something has always smacked me off that path. I think we all struggle with body image since we are bombarded with ideas and images of what we all should look like, not how we feel on the inside. Best wishes!
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Thanks to Sarah and Vanilla for the additional comments!
Sarah – so good to hear that you are in full recovery and have made it a priority to continue running for only the right reasons. That’s definitely something that has been a struggle for me initially – I used to use a GPS that included calories burned per run. For now, I know this is a trigger and negative influence for me, so I don’t use it. Perhaps, one day, I’ll be able to focus more on numbers, but right now, it’s not a good idea!
Vanilla – thanks so much for the encouragement. Looking back at that list,pre-disorder years, I would still be able to check off several of the items, too. The difference, though, is that I wasn’t obsessed and over the top! It’s strong women runners, like you, that inspire me to continue the path toward complete health, both mentally and physically!
This is a brave post and useful as well.
I think I have a relatively healthy attitude to food – as healthy as any woman’s attitude ever is. But I know my weaknesses and the dangers. I weigh myself every day, and a few years ago this had a BIG impact on my mood. Luckily I caught this in time. But unfortunately my body image is too closely aligned to whether I’m thinner or heavier. Running has been good for changing that – my ‘sturdy’ thighs finally look good in my eyes when I’m in running shorts.
Cathryn recently posted..Dons Battalion Veterans’ Day 4 Miler!
I can relate to Amanda’s fears around the past. My childhood was similar with a sister who could eat anything and never thought much about weight. I, on the other hand, was chubby. As a teen, I started dieting, and by age 14, I had full-blown anorexia. For 20 years, I struggled hard with the illness. Like Ginkgo, I had success initially, getting faster despite restricting. There a grace period, but it doesn’t last. The illness nearly killed me, but I did eventually recover. I think it’s really important for other to open up and share their experiences, so I’m really glad to see others doing so here.
Thanks, Lize! I am so glad you’ve been able to recover and that you are also sharing your experiences. It’s such a complicated disease – how it manifests itself in each person and the outside forces that are often at least partially to blame for it starting to begin with – and hopefully if we keep up the open dialogue and ask tough questions we can help young women nip the ed in the bud sooner or avoid it all together.
What a very well-written post! You address all the critical issues surrounding eating disorders among athletes; I completely agree that we just need more people to speak up about it!
Rachael recently posted..Raw Food Journal Entry 113: A Message to Mom