The fact that I regularly come across things like this while scanning the internet for fitness inspiration tells me that the line between fitspo and thinspo, and consequently the line between caring about fitness and having a disorder, is porous and blurry and easily crossed.
If you are prone to disordered eating, then the world of fitness must seem like a safe harbor, a place to indulge your obsessions without drawing criticism, because after all, you aren’t starving yourself completely and you’re spending a lot of time in the gym. You’re just being health-conscious!
And the bleed-over goes the other way. I read an essay in “Sole Sisters” about Amber Trotter, who was a champion runner as a high-school student, but whose competitive spirit led her to develop an eating disorder. She said it wasn’t even like she made a conscious decision; she just sort of slipped into it. Her eating disorder was so severe that she developed osteoporosis – when she was a sophomore in college.
Trotter is hardly an anomaly. As a commenter pointed out a few weeks back, female collegiate runners are extremely prone to developing eating disorders – maybe even more so than any other sport.
In fact, eating disorders among female athletes are so common that they’ve even named a condition for it, known as the “female athlete triad.” A female athlete with an eating disorder is likely to experience amenorrhea, low bone density and a lack of energy due to inadequate nutrition.
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