Dear Readers,
You may know Diane Israel from the powerful documentary film about her life, Beauty Mark. Diane was a highly successful triathlete for 15 years, the Colorado mountain running champion and a world-class racer. She was also anorexic from about the age of 12 until well into her twenties. She did not have a period until she was 30, and as a result, her bones weakened, leading to 17 stress fractures. Diane knew what she was doing to her body. Yet the combination of the teen’s belief that she was invincible and her fear the curves and added weight of womanhood would put an end to her running greatness made it easy to ignore the warning signs of a serious eating disorder.
The truth for her and for many eating-disordered athletes is that, “we don’t know how to handle being and staying a great athlete as our body changes,” says Diane. Coaches, she believes, must be educated so they can help the eating-disordered athlete “make the transition into adulthood while remaining a great athlete.”
I spoke to Diane this week in my job as coordinator for a planned National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) Coaches Toolkit. The toolkit will have all kinds of helpful advice for athletic coaches and trainers such as how to recognize athletes who are at risk for or are struggling with an eating disorder, how to broach the topic with them, and how to manage the tricky team dynamics that can result when one athlete is struggling with an eating disorder. We’ll be including Diane’s own story of her struggle with anorexia, and her advice to coaches on how to prevent more cases like hers from occurring.
At the root of all eating disorders, Diane believes, is a “lack of a sense of self,” what she calls the “self-esteem piece.” She didn’t feel okay about who she was; finding something she could control—how much she ate—numbed her feelings of self-hate and made her feel safer. It helped her make order out of what felt like a chaotic life.
For athletes, their coach is often a god-like figure who must be obeyed at all costs. “There’s a power over the athlete that goes into a parental role, [being a] father figure, or a sibling figure,” Diane explains. In order for coaches not to do the kind of harm that was done to her, says Diane, they must be educated, shown how to train top athletes without fostering eating problems. “Coaches have this obsession, this belief that if you’re thinner you’ll be better, in gymnastics, swimming, running,” Diane says. “We have to teach coaches that thin doesn’t mean better.” Learning to view the athlete as a complete person, not just a tool to help win the next championship is one way to make a better athlete. The coach needs to care about the athlete’s family life, her emotional state, her service to the planet, in other words, “to honor the whole human being,” not just the athletic being, according to Diane.
The coach also has to be able to voice concern over worrying symptoms. “If somebody had come up to me in the locker room and said, “I’m really worried about you,” says Israel, “I probably would have denied [being anorexic] but I would have known that at least someone cared about me. Nobody ever did that for me.” She urges coaches, and any loved ones to “speak from your own immediate pain. Don’t focus on their problem. Don’t say, ‘You look so sick or skinny.’ Say, ‘I’m worried about you. Fear comes up for me when I think of you.’”
Another pointer: “A huge thing when you are sick is that you feel crazy,” says Diane. The athlete needs to hear—from a coach, family member or friend, “There is support, and you are not crazy.”
Diane has also thought about the inescapable power of media messages telling us that thin is beautiful. Instead of whining about this, she’s developed a no-nonsense way to use popular culture as a tool. “We can blame the media, or we can notice how hooked we are,” she explains. “We can blame, blame blame, but the media is not going away.” Instead, she encourages people to use their reaction to media images of thinness as a barometer of how strong their self-image is at the moment. “When I’m at the health club and I get caught up in reality television or celebrity magazines, I know that my level of self-esteem or self-worth is really shaky. It means I’m focusing on the lacks,” Diane explains. Using media messages as a tool “can be a real gift, a way to show that we are not buying into the culture.”
The NEDA Coaches Toolkit is due out in late spring or summer. Currently available are NEDA Toolkits for Parents and for Educators.
Take care,
Nancy
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