Eating Disorders

Eating Disorders

All athletes aim to maximize their performance in their sport. They can obviously benefit from paying attention to what they eat. However, for some people these interests develop into an unhealthy obsession with food, calories and body weight. They worry continuously about what they are going to eat, when and where they're going to eat, how much weight they'll put on if they go out for a meal with friends, how many hours they'll have to exercise to burn off those calories, how they can avoid eating unwholesome foods, and so on.

Such an obsession with food and body weight is termed as an eating disorder. Eating disorders appear to be increasing throughout the United States. For example, the number of people seeking treatment for anorexia and bulimia in one California hospital has increased by 360 percent over the last nine years.

Experts argue that one factor is a fashion and celebrity model of the "perfect body" which has become gradually thinner over the last 40 years. This media-based pressure used to apply to only women, but in recent years advertising has expanded and led to a growing concern among men about whether their body obeys the "rules". Increased awareness and diagnosis may have also made an impact on recent statistics.

Research has identified a number of other factors thought to contribute to the development of eating disorders. Eating disorders may occur as a reaction to being brought up in a family which has difficulty in resolving conflict and expressing emotions, actual or feared sexual abuse, difficulty in coping with stress, and low self-esteem.

Returning back to athletes - they face additional pressures related to performance. For some athletes, such as distance runners, sprinters and swimmers, low body weight is thought to be a competitive advantage.

Athletes with eating disorders may not seek supervision for fear their disorder will be discovered. In addition, many athletes have little knowledge about proper weight loss methods and receive their information in unselective ways like from their friends, magazine crash diets, internet, and etc.

Such diets do not account for the high energy requirements resulting from training or the fact that maturing athletes have special nutritional requirements for growth and development. Not to mention, those who increase their training may experience calorie deprivation, because of not eating enough to meet their energy needs.

Their reduction