The not-so-secret cost of being superhuman: Elite sports’ problem with disordered eating
ELight sport has long been consumed by the idea of the superhuman. Pushing the human body’s capabilities to their limits in the hopes of uncovering the blueprint to develop bodies that can jump higher, run faster, and survive longer. And as professionalism has increased, so has the optimization of athletes’ bodies in the quest for optimal human fitness.
But recent revelations that former Australian cricket captain Meg Lanning cut short her international career due to her struggles with eating disorders have exposed some of the cracks that have long been forming in the elite sporting system.
According to research cited by the International Olympic Committee in 2019, up to 19% of male and 45% of female athletes worldwide exhibit disordered eating behavior. While Lanning’s recent revelation surprised many, she is far from the only athlete to have spoken out about these issues in recent years. From sprinter Jana Pittmanwho revealed that her own eating disorder had become entangled with achieving her sporting dreams of swimming Alicia Coutts, who routinely called out body shaming in her sport, the list of athletes publicly confronted about eating behavior in sports is steadily growing. Their revelations raise questions about unhealthy habits flourishing in an arena seen by many as the epitome of health.
Eating behavior in elite sport covers a spectrum, from optimized nutrition – where an athlete is supported through a specially designed plan for peak performance – to clinically diagnosed eating disorders. The often murky gray area in between is called ‘disordered eating’, defined by the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) as “problematic eating behavior that does not meet the clinical diagnosis of an eating disorder”.
Former professional netball player Nat Butler (née Medhurst) found himself in this gray area in 2010.
“I had a strong feeling that it would be a lot better for everyone if I was gone,” she admits, looking back on her mental state during this period. Despite being a World Cup-winning Australian Diamond in the prime of her career at the age of 26, she found herself without a place with her team, the Adelaide Thunderbirds, forcing an unexpected move to the Queensland Firebirds. Although she was relieved to be able to continue playing the sport she loved, her mental health suffered and she struggled with near-constant depression and thoughts of suicide.
“I felt like I had no control over a lot of things, especially the way I thought about myself,” she says. “But the only thing I knew I could control was exercise and food intake, so that’s what I did.”
Although Butler has never been diagnosed with an eating disorder, she is acutely aware that the behaviors she developed around food and exercise were not healthy.
“There was a lot of weight loss and I had a very disordered, unhealthy relationship with food,” she says. “My depression was significant and I struggled with all of this in silence for about four years.”
Sarah Coyte began exhibiting problematic eating behaviors when she took up cricket seriously as a teenager.
“I was the kid who ordered chicken and veggies without any veggies,” she says. “When I got a cricket scholarship at 17, I decided to join a gym and started eating a little better. I started losing weight very quickly and all my fitness results improved. People started noticing and commenting and I enjoyed hearing those comments – the more I heard them, the more I wanted to train.”
Coyte continued to progress in cricket with selection for the NSW and Australian teams, but her relationship with food became more problematic when she suffered an injury from overtraining. Soon the fear of not being able to lose weight took over. She severely restricted her food intake and vomited after every meal until a colleague noticed her behavior and asked her if she had an eating disorder.
“That really confronted me,” she says. “I had to contact the doctor at Cricket Australia and get help, and that’s when I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.” Ultimately, Coyte found the high-pressure environment of elite cricket too difficult to cope with and made the decision to retire shortly before her 26th birthday.
‘It’s all intertwined with the sports system’
For Dr Sue Byrne – a psychologist specializing in eating disorders at the University of Western Australia – stories like this are unfortunately not rare.
“Eating disorders and eating disorders are common, even in the general population,” she says. “But there are some socio-cultural groups that are at greater risk for eating disorders, and elite athletes are one of them.”
While there are genetic factors that contribute to an individual’s likelihood of developing an eating disorder, there are also environmental and neurological factors that play a role – and this is what athletes are particularly susceptible to.
“There is increasing pressure on (elite athletes) to achieve and maintain a certain body shape,” said Dr. Byrne. “And neurologically, the people who are vulnerable to eating disorders tend to have certain characteristics – they tend to be highly driven, perfectionistic, competitive high achievers who want to follow the rules. And those are also the qualities you need to be a good athlete.”
Recent posts that the AFL will not conduct body composition assessmentssuch as skin fold testing, in players under 18 years of age received a lot of criticism. But despite criticism from experts, both Coyte and Butler believe these tests can be harmful.
“Skin folds were always a big trigger for me,” says Coyte. “Especially then, there were measures that seemed unfeasible for different body types and different roles that people played.”
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“I remember at one of the clubs I was at we had skin folds almost every two weeks,” Butler says. “It was just accepted as part of the criticism and pressure we faced as top athletes.”
Dr. Brooke Devlin and Dr Georgia Black from the University of Queensland’s School of Human Movement and Nutrition believe this is an area that is starting to change. With developments such as the publication of the AIS position statement on disordered eating in 2020 and Swimming Australia’s guidelines for the prevention and management of this behavior in 2023, sporting organizations are beginning to realize that this problem will not go away on its own.
“We’re slowly starting to see a shift in what’s being monitored,” says Devlin. “For example, body composition (is) assessed via DXA (dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry), so the focus is now more on monitoring bone health rather than body fat percentage… given the link between meeting energy needs and improving the bone mineral thickness.”
Black also notes that much of the existing data is based on studies of male athletes, making it difficult to say whether current measures are effective or harmful for female athletes.
“Only about 10% of sport and exercise research since 2014 has focused on studies conducted only in women,” she says. “We don’t know what we don’t know. Anecdotally, however, it is clear that we need to retrain long-standing culture and beliefs about body composition monitoring.”
While attitudes continue to change, stories like Lanning’s highlight that there is still work to be done. Dr. Adele Pavlidis, a researcher with a focus on socio-cultural issues in sport at Griffith University, believes this will require broad structural change.
“The sport is now recognizing it and making investments, but the concern I have is that it is becoming a purely clinical matter,” she says. “It’s all about the individual. But it is not an individual’s fault for having mental health issues such as eating disorders; it is all intertwined with the sports system.”
‘I don’t want other people to experience what I went through’
For Butler, being able to have these conversations is already an important step. She still finds it difficult to talk about this part of her life, but forces herself to speak out to help other athletes.
“I don’t want other people to go through what I went through,” she says. “I know that talking about it can help someone realize that what they are going through is not right.”
Coyte is also passionate about the subject and wants to use her experiences to influence change. Since her return to cricket, two years after her initial retirement, she has noticed positive developments such as skinfold tests and weight checks becoming optional. But she believes more can be done to make the elite sporting environment safer for athletes.
“You definitely need to eat right for your sport, but there are different ways to fuel your body, and they need to let athletes figure out what works best for them and trust athletes to do that,” she says.
In the competitive world of sports there will always be a drive for continuous improvement. It is the nature of the environment to continually progress – records will be broken, new training regimens will make athletes increasingly skilled than before. As sports organizations begin to recognize that the methods behind this push for progress need to be better managed, the first change could be moving away from the idea of the superhuman and instead recognizing – and even embracing – that athletes are just people.