Lean Dreams: Eating Disorders on NCAA Teams

We see her running at cross-country and track meets every season; we watch her as she propels her thin arms and legs, conspicuous ribs, hollow cheeks and eyes, bulging veins and concave stomach forward. The visible markers on her body shout that something is not right, as her drive for perfection pushes her towards a dangerous dance with death .

The prominence of professional sports in America places athletes on the highest pedestal of celebrity, praise and respect. This cultural phenomenon gets replicated in college athletics in the form of big time Division I athletic programs. Often times, these programs incite the same excitement and feverish fandom as professional sports do - sometimes even more so because of the appeal of an athlete’s amateur status to the American imagination , and the almost cultish following of the universities that these athletes represent. Without question, the enormous pressure to excel and win in NCAA Division I programs creates serious issues concerning the physical well being of its athletes.

Because of their dedication and discipline, athletes often tread on the boundary between healthy and unhealthy physical habits. When one thinks of nutrition and Division I sports , the concept of anorexia does not seem logical; however, a growing number of female Division I athletes face this serious and potentially fatal problem.

We’ve all heard of anorexia nervosa—a physical and mental disorder in which a person is so afraid of becoming overweight that he or she does not consume enough calories to maintain a healthy lifestyle or sustain his or her athletic training. Studies show that disordered eating, including anorexia and bulimia, strikes at least one-third of all female collegiate athletes.(1) For years eating disorders have fueled the dark underbelly of our sport –most athletes and coaches know they exist, but few of them willingly engage in an open and honest public discussion about them.

Sports like swimming, cycling, and running, where participants are deemed “naturally skinny,” potentially mask this serious disorder; an athlete’s already strict diet and workout regime makes it harder to detect and diagnose an eating disorder. A joint study by the Anorexia Centre at Huddinge Hospital in Stockholm and the Swedish Sports Federation found that “the main causes of anorexia in elite sport were high levels of physical activity, including heavy training, in combination with difficulties in eating enough food to meet the energy requirement of this activity”.(2) In sports that demand high caloric outputs, like running, a lack of nutrition often results in unhealthy weight loss .

One Division I athlete I interviewed, who chose to remain anonymous, spotted eating disorders amongst her teammates during her freshman year. In an interview she observed,

“We’d go to the dinning hall together and you’d see what people eat, or they don’t. Plus, one of the girls told me one of our teammates was quitting because she was bulimic and another was ‘redshirting’ because she was anorexic.”

(Note: The term “redshirt” refers to student-athletes who do not compete in their sport for an entire academic year; many athletes continue to practice with their teams and they use that year of eligibility to compete for a fifth year.)

Statistics reveal the sobering reality of eating disorders among female athletes. In a 2002 study, Katherine Beals, a competitive athlete and Associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, interviewed 425 female subjects and found that 43 percent “were terrified of being or becoming too heavy, and 55% reported experiencing pressure to achieve or maintain a certain weight”. Given this reality, it is not surprising that between 2-3 percent of all female college athletes meet the diagnostic criteria for a full-blown eating disorder .

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