Athletes and Eating Disorders:
What Coaches, Parents, and Teammates Need to Know

Involvement in organized sports can offer many benefits, such as improved self-esteem and body image and encouragement fro individuals to remain active throughout their lives. Athletic competition, however, can cause sever psychological and physical stress. When the pressures of athletic competition are added to an existing cultural emphasis on thinness, the risks increase for athletes to develop disordered eating. In a study of Division 1 NCAA athletes, over one-third of female athletes reported attitudes and symptoms placing them at risk for anorexia nervosa. Though most athletes with eating disorders are female, male athletes are also at risk – especially those competing in sports that tend to place an emphasis on the athlete’s diet, appearance, size, and weight requirements, such as wrestling, body building, crew, running and football. 

Risk Factors for Athletes:
• Sports that emphasize appearance or weight requirement.  For example: gymnastics,   diving, bodybuilding or wrestling – e.g., wrestlers trying to “make weight.”
• Sports that focus on the individual rather than the entire team. For example: gymnastics, running, figure skating, dance or diving, versus teams sports like basketball or soccer
• Endurance sports such as: track and field/running, swimming
• Inaccurate belief that lower body weight will improve performance
• Training for a sport since childhood or being an elite athlete
• Low self-esteem, family dysfunction, families with eating disorders, chronic dieting, history of physical or sexual abuse, peer, family and cultural pressures to be thin, and other traumatic life experiences
• Coaches who focus only on success and performance rather than on the athlete as a whole person
Three factors have been thought to contribute to the odds that a person will be dissatisfied with his or her body: social influences, performance anxiety and the athlete’s self-appraisal.

Protective Factors for Athletes:
• Positive, person-oriented coaching style rather than negative, performance-oriented coaching style
• Social influence and support from teammates with healthy attitudes towards size and shape
• Coaches who emphasize factors that contribute to personal success as motivation and enthusiasm rather than body weight or shape
The Female Athlete Triad includes 1) disordered eating, 2) loss of menstrual periods and 3) osteoporosis (loss of calcium resulting in weak bones). The lack of nutrition resulting from disordered eating can cause the loss of several or more consecutive periods. This in turn leads to calcium and bone loss, putting the athlete at greatly increased risk for stress fractures of the bones. Each of these conditions is a medical concern. Together they create serious health risks that may be life-threatening. While any female athlete can develop the triad, adolescent girls are most at risk because of the active biological changes and growth spurts, peer and social pressures, and rapidly changes life circumstances that go along with the teenage years. Males may develop similar syndromes.

The International Olympic Committee had published recommendations for reducing the risk of the Female Athlete Triad, available at:   http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_517.pdf