“I never looked ill, I just looked like an athlete.”
This elite sportswoman says she “became a bit obsessive with counting calories and weighing things” until she realised she had become “dangerously light”.
More than a third of 143 respondents to a BBC questionnaire sent to elite British sportswomen said they have experienced disordered eating.
Some who filled it out anonymously said they had restricted food because of social media abuse about the way they look and others because they need to meet weight categories for their sports.
Others said it was because they felt they did not meet expectations of what an athlete was ‘supposed to’ look like.
According to eating disorder charity Beat, disordered eating is about abnormal behaviours or attitudes that may not yet “meet the diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder but are still having a significant impact on someone’s life”.
Read the entire article here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/68445195