As part of my work coordinating the National Eating Disorders Association’s Coaches Toolkit I’ve learned a lot about the interplay between athletics, both at the high school and college level, and eating disorders. Experts tend to warn parents to be vigilant about “high-risk” sports with built-in weight, size or shape demands, such as gymnastics, rowing, diving, cross country and wrestling. The truth is, however, that any sport can give rise to disordered eating or an eating disorder.
Take Patrick Bergstrom, for example, one of our Coaches Toolkit advisory committee members. He was a three-season high school athlete (lacrosse, soccer and football), and the quintessential jock: competitive, popular, and handsome.
Hard work, intelligence and perfectionism helped Patrick sail through high school, where he was nominated for the title of Maryland public school player of the year. The sport he excelled at and loved most was lacrosse. Although coaches told him he was too small to play in college, he thought if he trained harder and lifted more than anyone else, he would overcome this hurdle just like any other.
It was in college that his golden run ended, and he began to face challenges on the field. Where he had admired and respected his high school coach, in college, he says, “My coaches, for the most part, were horrible.” During his college career, he went through five coaches. The one coach he connected with, a mentor figure, was killed in a freak accident on Patrick’s birthday. On top of his difficulties with coaches, the pressure of competitive college athletics was a new experience.
“I wasn’t even at a state school yet you would think we were playing for a national championship,” Patrick says. Although he had trained six days a week in high school, until college, he says, “I really hadn’t faced adversity.“ For the first time in his athletic career, he had a coach who didn’t believe in his ability. He sat on the bench most of his senior year, and recalls, “That was devastating to me. My life kind of went chaotic from there.”
His obsession with being “bigger, stronger and more cut,” had already led him to experiment with supplements such as creatine, yet he knew little about nutrition. As his life became more chaotic, he began to abuse alcohol. His eating patterns deteriorated until he was eating less than a meal a day and suffering fainting spells. By the end of his junior year in college his eating disorder had become full-blown. Patrick hit bottom several years after graduating from college, sought treatment and eventually overcame the eating disorder.
Now, two years after his recovery, he heads an eating disorders educational and advocacy organization, I Chose to Live. He’s heard from hundreds of men and boy athletes suffering from eating issues. Most of the time, he says, the stories are similar to his own: perfectionist, popular, athletic, and smart people whose identities and self-esteem are completely tied up with their success as athletes.
Although his sport was not a traditional high-risk sport, Patrick notes that his story is typical of male athletes with eating disorders. “I wanted to be bigger, stronger, faster,” he says. The “ripped six-pack and a muscular build” are the typical body ideal for the male athlete. His disorder was also diagnosed very late, when it had reached a crisis stage and hospitalization was essential. The extreme stigma males with eating disorders face makes them expert at covering up the disease, and their denial of the problem extreme. My biggest fear, he says, “was the reaction others would have when they found out I had an eating disorder.”
Patrick has heard from hundreds of male athletes about their eating problems, and spoken with many parents, too. Travel clubs and increasingly professionalized youth leagues have made athletics highly competitive for younger and younger kids, he notes; he’s seen boys as young as nine who are overexercising and suffering from eating issues.
Coaches need to take an interest in the whole athlete, Patrick says, and not just in how well the athlete will perform on the field. He advises coaches who suspect an athlete is suffering from disordered eating or an eating disorder “not to call them out in front of the team, but to be patient, sit the athlete down, have a heart to heart and see what’s going on in the athlete’s heart and mind.” Parents, like coaches, need to encourage their children to play hard, but without losing sight of the fun of sport, and to know the difference between “being the best you can be” and “being the best.”
Take care,
Nancy
Comments