Anorexia and sports

I know the NCAA has done a lot to raise awareness of these issues, particularly with coaching education.

Coaches comments about weight have come up in at least one Title IX lawsuit I can think of.

 

Eating disorders are mental issues. They don't care what sex you are. They don't care what sport you play. They don't care about your ethnic background. And they don't care about your age.

There exists a misguided belief that eating disorders are specific to young white women. Slightly more than 10 million folks in this country have diagnosed eating disorders. Ten percent of those are men. I'm sure the male percentage would be higher if men - and women will love this - were willing to talk about their issues. There have been no definitive eating disorder studies in men for that simple reason.

I've trained folks and have been a fitness consultant through the years. I've had numerous clients with eating disorders. Everybody looking at this site knows a person with an eating disorder. I'm sure every reporter knows an athlete with one, too.

Most of us simply have no clue who they are. But, I can assure you they're more than just Little Girls in Pretty Boxes.

 

And to add to Milo's excellent points, not every person with an eating disorder is a skin-and-bones size 2. You can't tell just by looking at someone. Hell, it's possible that Daly could be diagnosed.

 

Certain types of overeating are considered to be eating disorders. It's not just anorexia and bulimia that are considered mental illnesses.

 

But when does overeating turn to a disorder? The symptoms -- at least the ones typically tied to "traditional" eating disorders -- wouldn't be as obvious.

 

I remember a few years ago on this board there was a thread about a lawsuit that a woman who had an eating disorder filed against a high school basketball coach who cut her and told her she needed to lose 10 pounds.
Most people on this board pooh-poohed the suit as frivolous. I still maintain that the coach would have been better off telling her she needed to pass a fitness test of some sort, running a mile in a certain amount of time, doing a certain number of suicides within a certain period of time, something like that, giving her that sort of thing as a goal, not weight loss.
Yes, this world would be a better place if more people would just suck it up and get on with their lives rather than trying to sue anyone whom they think messed up their life. The thing is, the coach could have and should have handled it differently.

 

I suppose there's a big difference between not eating because of an emotional reason and not eating in order to "make weight." Not that one is healthier than the other. Just that there are internal issues with one and external issues with the other. Seems to me the former is the more serious.

 

Juliet Macur wrote something on this topic when she was at the DMN. I remember it was in the BASW a few years back. It was just fucking amazing, one of those stories that you read, it stays with you for awhile and you read it again...

 

I just hope the horror of anorexia never spills over to the world of Sportswriting!

God save Bob Ryan!!!

 

As soon as a doctor or pharmaceutical company can make money off of it.

 

Don't forget cross country.

On the college paper, I wanted to do a feature on this girl who was an exceptional athlete as well as a philanthropist of sorts (her family came from money and she was donating some of her inheritance). Anyhow, I interviewed her and some of her teammates. One fact that surfaced was she was anorexic and I found out many of her teammates were, too. The coach was weight-obsessed and said no girl runner (for him) could weigh more than 125 lbs. -- no matter the height.

I never wrote a word about the eating disorders nor about the coach who demanded such harsh restrictions on his athletes. I guess at the time I felt like he was the coach and he could do what he wanted to do and that someone above him surely had to know what was going on.

To this day, I regret never writing about that.

 

Lineman on the high school football team is listed at 225.

Asked what weight he was going to wrestle, he said 189. There's not an ounce of fat on him.

Don't know how he's going to lose 36 pounds of muscle.