Eating disorder culture and the female runner’s mind-body disconnect

The running community is safer than it used to be but many runners still face a deeply ingrained eating disorder culture and the need to build healthy mind-body connections.

The last day of June was a rare, cool summer evening. A heatwave, which had stretched like a yawn over the previous days, clutching the city in a sticky haze, finally broke. The air was fresh as the sun dipped lower, and the mood at the Wisconsin Lutheran High School track was electric.

Runners from across Wisconsin and beyond turned out for the WISCO Mile, an annual track meet consisting of only mile-long races (and a 5k), where competitors toe the line in hopes of winning the coveted first prize: a pineapple. The meet started with boys’ and girls’ middle school races, then moved through heats of freshmen, community open, high school elite and masters, ended with the Super races — the fastest of the fast men and women competing for prize money. The top men are typically on a quest to run sub-4 times, and this year, three men, a Wisconsin record, accomplished this.

While all the races were thrilling to watch, the earlier, oft-overlooked middle school girls’ race caught my attention. Specifically, the performance of an eighth-grader who clocked a 4:55 mile to win the race and set a new meet age-group record.

The excitement, pride, even awe that I expected to feel upon hearing about the girl’s success never came. Instead, I felt my stomach sink.

Why do I feel this way? I asked myself.

After some reflection, I realized that my reaction was not related to the young athlete personally, but rather my own perceptions of running culture — the pressures, whether self-inflicted or from outside sources, mental challenges and discomfort that come with being a successful young athlete in a changing body. Without even knowing this athlete, I was terrified of how the sport might hurt her.

The ‘thinner is faster’ fallacy

In 2019, Mary Cain exploded the running community with her story of mistreatment, mental illness and eating disorders under the coaching of Alberto Salazar. Lauren Fleshman wrote candidly about her struggles with body image and her decision to step away from competing professionally. Molly Seidel and Alexi Pappas shared intimate accounts of surviving mental illness crises. Most recently, Allie Ostrander announced that she is stepping back from training to undergo treatment for an eating disorder.

Here, some of the best and most accomplished athletes in the world — Olympic medalists, national record-holders and young phenoms — are using their platforms to bring awareness to the mental and physical struggles that many female athletes face today.

As a teenage athlete, my eating disorder went hand in hand with running. If I ate too much, I convinced myself I would never be successful. My illness told me that if I lost control over what I put in my mouth, my life was not worth living. Through competing in high school and college, I have connected with countless women who lived the same experience — watched the same, rail-thin athletes get faster and faster, then suddenly become plagued by chronic injuries and fade away. We were at once enthralled and terrified of this process, feeling somehow distanced and invincible, even as we slipped comfortably into our own disordered tendencies.

At the same time, running remained our greatest joy. The gleaming moments where the sport was simply an escape, a game, pure unfettered freedom, were enough to keep us hooked. But the weigh-ins, the subtle comments from coaches, uniforms that highlight our worst insecurities, injury, mental illness, heartbreak — these burdens sometimes felt too heavy to bear.

In high school and college, I battled depression, bulimia, anorexia and orthorexia, fueled by the belief that my changing body, slow times on the track and constant injuries were moral failings. I suffered for two dark years until I made the decision to seek help and start recovery.

Today, I still struggle, but I practice healthy behavior until it becomes a habit. The more I let the pursuit of joy dictate my decisions, the more successful I am. Simultaneously, it is no longer the end of the world when I fail. The walls do not come crashing down around me. I learn and try again. This process all comes down to trusting my body again. Eating disorders destroy the trust between mind and body. We convince ourselves that our body will betray us, that it cannot possibly know what’s best, that following a strict plan, working against our instincts is the only path to success. In this way, my eating disorder decimated what is supposed to come most naturally to me.

Exploring my true hunger cues, learning to nourish and cherish myself, was foreign, scary and unknown. I felt I was always on the brink of a betrayal. What if my body is different from everyone else’s? What if I hate myself after I recover? What if I am not actually sick, just lazy?

Any true runner knows that the sport is just as much mental as it is physical. When the mind-body connection breaks down, everything crumbles. Spending hours alone with only your thoughts, body and breath should foster a strong sense of understanding and trust between the brain and the body — but what often happens instead, especially for developing female athletes, is an intentional suffocation of this connection. Instead of leaning into our bodies’ needs, we gaslight ourselves and let the mind take over, which isn’t sustainable in the long term.

“They’re not connected to their body,” Registered Dietician Annie Weiss told FanSided. “They’re not connected with, ‘I need to eat to sustain life,’ it’s ‘I’m eating because it’s my sport.’ But that’s not okay.”

“These runners are people that are sacrificing their own health to get to a certain time or place…and what’s the outcome? You get a handshake; you get a medal. Why is that more important than our own health?” Weiss said.

As an athlete and a dietician, Weiss advocates for more open, nurturing conversations about body image and mental health.

Eating disorders are especially pervasive in female athletes, a 2010 study reports. The majority of cases are subclinical, or difficult to notice, due to the general expectation that female athletes be thinner than average.

“We’ve taken it to the extreme, though, of people just simply not understanding disordered eating or eating disorders,” she said.

Kacy Seynders, an Atlanta-based physical therapist and runner, said that disordered eating patterns often become evident during injury. Also, athletes are sometimes unaware of these patterns until they come to Seynders for treatment.

“Even the smallest thing, like considering changing your eating habits or feeling guilty for eating certain foods when you’re injured, is inherently unhealthy behavior,” she told FanSided.

Though she now helps other athletes work through their problems, Seynders, 29,  has been in recovery from anorexia since her early teenage years. At 13, a combination of depression, anxiety and anorexia eventually led to her hospitalization. Seynders noted that these problems came up especially during big life changes, such as the transition to high school, college and starting new jobs.

During her stint in the hospital, Seynders was screened for organ damage and safely increased her caloric intake; however, Seynders said she thinks she could have benefitted from further treatment.

“I think doing more extensive inpatient therapy would have really changed the trajectory of how I was socially, my confidence levels and how I really looked at myself,” she said.

With some residential programs charging up to $30,000 out of pocket monthly, the high price tag is one major deterrent for patients seeking treatment. “My parents would’ve had to turn their lives upside down [to afford inpatient]” Seynders said.

Another barrier is lack of intervention. “My parents didn’t know what to do,” said Seynders. “That was the biggest thing. And I don’t blame them.”

In her video detailing her beginning stages of recovery, Ostrander says that she has only heard recovery success stories from the perspective of triumphant reflection, never as an ongoing process. When people open up, the narrative is generally “I struggled, I found help, I got better, I was wildly successful,” rather than: “I am currently struggling and I don’t know what the future holds.”

This era of unknowns is the most difficult time in recovery because there is no foresight and no guarantee that success is on the horizon. Ostrander is right that it’s important to talk about the unknowns because deciding to start recovery is one of the hardest steps in the entire process.

“Giving up that control is really, really hard because you can’t see the other side,” said Weiss. “To give up whatever rules you have around eating is far scarier than the potential success that you would have by eating X, Y, and Z, or, you know, breaking those rules.”

Disordered eating: Informed discussions

Having informed, open, supportive discussions with athletes before and throughout puberty is key to preventing disordered eating. Aaron Burrick, a child and family therapist, sees this firsthand in his clients.

Burrick specializes in treating young, high-achieving children, of which about 25 percent are athletes. Burrick said he often sees perfectionism as a dominant personality trait in his athlete clients.

“It’s both a blessing and a curse,” he told FanSided. “The same quality that allows them to achieve so well is also what kind of encourages them down a very rigid path when it comes to how they feel their bodies and what food they should and should not be consuming.”

Much of the information given to athletes, according to Burrick, still revolves around “good” and “bad” foods, a mentality that strips away the experience, connection and culture of eating.

“I think whenever we become so set on something only having one purpose, we’re really closing ourselves off to a lot of opportunities for happiness and growth,” he said. So a big part of what I do with my clients is really broaden their understanding of food, both for them athletically and for them as a person, because we aren’t just athletes.”

Burrick also works with clients to prioritize stepping out of their roles as athletes and work to embrace their social self, their cultural self, their self as a family member — which allows food to give them a variety of experiences that don’t center on performance.

Athletes as young as 10 years old, said Burrick, already have an idea of how they feel their bodies should look. Many also look to food as a tool for changing their appearance, rather than as fuel for activity.

“That’s a relationship that I work hard with my athletes to break down,” he said.

Representation in running

The running community is safer than it used to be, but there is still work to do. Throughout the decade I have been involved in the running community, I have noticed positive change, thanks to the brave athletes who have shared their stories and used their platform for good, in addition to the steady work of everyday runners, passionate coaches, supportive teammates and individuals waging silent revolutions.

“I think for a long time running was described as a really inclusive sport but we saw no representations of major parts of the population,” Burrick said.

In recent years, social media has facilitated greater representation of athletes of all genders, sexualities and body types. This is good exposure for young athletes; however, coaches and parents typically don’t have the same online experience.

“I think the Gen Z years and younger are beginning to see more, in my opinion, healthy representations online,” Burrick said.

Coaches and parents, he added, could benefit from exposure to  “more contemporary research and representations of what running and eating looks like, as well as how we can cultivate that food culture within our athletes.”

Too often, though, the conversation starts and ends with the resolve to “do better,” without committing to any specific changes. While open communication is key, we need to go beyond surface-level conversations. As an impressionable young athlete at war with my body, I wasn’t being pressured to lose weight. My head coaches, always men, either avoided the topic altogether or made general statements about getting enough calories.

Weight gain and eating disorders have become taboo topics of conversation in the running community, so much so that many coaches, especially men, don’t know how to approach these topics with their female athletes. As athletes, we are taught to be bold and fearless, yet we can rarely count on our superiors to brave the tough conversations.

While filling out medical paperwork in preparation for my first year of Division I college running, I ticked the box that indicated a history of eating disorders, specifically bulimia. As a result, I was sent off to the university (not athlete-specific) dietician, who advised me to eat more than 2,000 calories per day and sent me on my way with a meal plan. On the surface, it seems like the school did its job in connecting me with help; however, nobody ever checked in on me or followed up.

A dietician can be a valuable resource for athletes who are ready to recover or who need advice and support, but my experience simply furthered the divide in my mind-body connection. Instead of addressing the root cause of my problem, helping me to trust my body or tune in to my needs, her cut-and-dry calorie counting and meal plan pushed me further away from finding the trust I desperately needed to recover.

“We’re very conditioned to listen to all these external voices, in the forms of apps, watches, people, diet [regimens] and social media instead of listening to our own bodies,” Weiss said.

Weiss, who is a successful ultra-runner and previous course-record holder for the Fastest Known Time Ice Age Trail 1,200 miler, said that the disconnect between athletes’ minds and bodies is the “core issue with the entire world of running and eating disorders.”

The best place to start dismantling this culture is at home, according to Weiss. “Parents have to stop commenting,” she said. “They have to stop saying, ‘why do you look this way? Why is your belly this way? Why are you eating this way?’ They’ve got to stop and just let kids be kids.”

Conversations centered around buzz phrases and oversimplifications such as “food is fuel” and “just eat enough,” are a disservice to the complexities of an extremely dangerous mental illness.

The solution? Get to young athletes before they need help. Help them understand from the get-go that the body is not the enemy. Stop rewarding thinness, have difficult conversations, point out successful athletes at every size and stage — especially the awkward, uncomfortable, in-betweens. Talk to girls about menstruation, hormones and fluctuating bodies. Teach them that change will be uncomfortable, then give them the tools to overcome that discomfort.

Like Weiss, Seynders agrees that the best way to disrupt eating disorder culture is through open conversations between athletes, coaches and parents. Many coaches, she added, don’t know how to approach conversations about periods, hormones and puberty.

“They’re going to slow down at some point, most likely in their high school, cross country or track career,” Seynders said. It’s hard to understand. Especially being runners, we want to put work in and get a result out. And we want it all to be direct. Unfortunately, our hormones have other ideas.”

The 12-year-old body is not the 17-year-old body, the 21-year-old body is not the 28-year-old body. At each stage of development, the body does not look or perform the same; however, with effort, we can foster happy, healthy and well-adjusted athletes at every stage. Though it may be too late for me and my cohorts, our knowledge, experience and stories allow us to be the change for the future of the sport.