I talk about a lot of sports and eating habits for athletes in these blog posts. They all are important for people to know because helping someone realize their disorder is a big part of them starting to get help.

In the blog post that I talked about what should be in an athlete’s diet, I mentioned that athletes need to be able to consume more calories because of their workouts. They work off a lot of the calories that they eat and it’s important for them to be able to eat those back.

Athletes have to be more cautious about their diets and what they’re eating because of the amount they work out. I talked about an athlete’s diet a lot and the signs of seeing if an athlete looks to have an eating disorder because all of these have significance.

Eating Disorders are scary things that an destroy not only athletes but anyone that has one. I think that it’s important that society starts to see the affect that they have on athletes and their eating habits. Society has been something that I’ve mentioned numerous amounts of times and that’s because society doesn’t realize that they are partially responsible.

We put in our heads at a young age what people should look like when they play a certain sport and we carry that into reality. What I mean is that the stereotypes that we create starts to become some people’s reality, but the truth is, is that we are all made differently, and our bodies aren’t all meant to look exactly the same for different sports.

Athletes shouldn’t have eating disorders, no one should. People should be paying close attention to their athletes, friends, family members, anyone really.

I chose to talk about the difference in eating actual protein and the powder protein because a significant number of athletes use the powder. They’re concerned with gaining the muscle that they feel the need to use the powder and sometimes don’t eat actual protein that they may need.

Protein is an important part of an athlete’s diet. I know that this blog is about eating disorders, but I feel like this is important to know too. According to Freeletics.com, protein is important because it’s important for an athlete to gain lean muscle but also maintain muscle tissue.

So why is this even a topic of discussion? It’s because some athletes overdo the protein powder. They drink it after a practice or a lift and then forget about the normal proteins that they should be taking in.

The article says that if athletes have access to lean proteins then they should be using those. It also says that only is certain situations should you use protein shakes. However, too much protein can lead to unwanted weight gain and that’s not what athletes want. They want more defined muscles instead.

https://www.freeletics.com/en/blog/posts/protein-shake-vs-protein-food/

Protein is good there’s no questioning it but too much of it isn’t healthy. Athletes are so concerned with their bodies and that’s why I put this in to the blog posts. They don’t want to be too skinny but being too fat isn’t acceptable and they need to have muscles because that’s also important. We put the pressure on them to do all of these things and to be concerned with weight which for them shouldn’t be a concern at all.

A sport that is very well known for eating disorders is dance. Dancers are notorious for not eating and it’s seen commonly throughout all dancers usually.

According to Eating disorder Hope’s website, ballet dancers tend to have a higher risk of developing an eating disorder then any other athlete. This is because they believe that being thinner will affect their dance. They believe that they will look prettier dancing if they’re smaller.

Ballet dancing is similar to gymnastics in the matter that they both show off based on appearance. It makes sense that both the sports have high risks of eating disorders since people are placed to a standard to look a certain way for people because they are showing off appearances.

A section in the Eating Disorder Hope website says, “dancers are often required to wear tight, revealing attire and are constantly performing in front of mirrors, an audience, etc,”. This gives the dancers a thought that they have to look skinny since they are in front of an audience in clothing that is tighter.

https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/blog/bulimia-nervosa-ballet-dancers

I bring up the volleyball player that I first talked about because one of the reasons why she developed an eating disorder was because she was in spandex in front of a group of people. This is common in not only dancers but in almost every sport that is a little more revealing.

One of my earlier blog posts was about why athlete’s feel like they need to look a certain way and I answered it saying it’s because society tells them that they have to look skinny and fit. I feel like dancers are answering that question pretty well since they show off their body because dance is all about how the body moves. Of course, they’re going to think about whether they look fat or not because there is probably one person that they are performing in front of that will mention their weight. This is what makes it so hard for dancers to overcome their eating disorder because they have to overcome what people are thinking.

The article above says that they should “gain control” over the situation which is a hard thing to do but if people help dancers do it then maybe they wouldn’t be as scared to try and gain control.

In my last blog post, I talked about how men are less likely to come out about eating disorders. They may feel like they aren’t supposed to feel like they can be affected by something like this or even because society says that it’s abnormal for them to be affected by this illness.

I decided to look up how likely men are to come out about eating disorders, I found this article from mirror-mirror.org that I thought was interesting.

https://www.mirror-mirror.org/men.htm

The article talks about how in today times, people are more likely to think that teenage girls are affected by eating disorders and that’s it. People don’t realize that older and younger women can be affected and are surprised when they hear that men can have eating disorders also.

The article then says, “It is estimated that approximately 10% of eating disorder sufferers are men, but it is likely that this figure would be higher if more men came forward with their problem”. There are so many men that are afraid of what society would think of them for having a disease like this since it’s not “manly”. The article states that eating disorders are a “women’s disease” and that makes it harder for men to come out about them.

I truly don’t understand why society puts people in categories and says that they can’t be or have one thing because they are a certain race or gender. The whole concept of eating disorders being a “women’s disease” does make sense though because think about if a football player was to come out about their eating disorder. Football is seen as one of the toughest and manliest sports so coming out about something that could seem more girly would give them a higher chance of being made fun of or picked on.

In a different article from Eating Disorders Victoria, it says that 25% of people that have an eating disorder are males.

https://www.eatingdisorders.org.au/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-a-males

Once again, I bring up how society views athletes and people in general and it ruins some people at times. It tears a person a part because they feel like something more is wrong with them since they have a certain problem that society says that they can’t have.

We put in boys’ heads that they have to like trucks not Barbies, the color blue and not pink, they have to play football and not be dancers and what we don’t see is that we are ruining them. They become scared to speak up about something because it’s too girly and in my opinion that should change.

There is no reason why a man cannot speak up about an eating disorder.

I’ve mentioned football a few times in this and for this blog post, I’ve decided to talk about football and how they can develop eating disorders also. Football isn’t a common sport for people to think that the players develop eating disorders but a lot of them do.

I’ve talked to some of the players on my team and they talk about how their coaches tell them they need to eat more and that they don’t want to eat so much but they need to gain weight. In one of my earlier blog posts, one of the articles said that it doesn’t matter the weight for a player and that their weight won’t affect how they play other then make them slower. So why is weight so important for football and football coaches?

According to Gatorade Sports and Science Institute, it’s important for the player to know what they are eating to gain weight and also know their body composition. Certain positions are going to be larger then others and have to gain weight.

https://www.gssiweb.org/sports-science-exchange/article/sse-145-football-player-body-composition-importance-of-monitoring-for-performance-and-health

I also found this other website that explains more about eating disorders within football and more popular sports such as baseball and basketball. The website is Walden Eating Disorders and is below.

https://www.waldeneatingdisorders.com/which-athletes-are-most-likely-to-develop-eating-disorders/

There’s a sentence that says,”40% of Cornell University football players surveyed engaged in binging and purging, which is associated with bulimia”. This is actually the opposite of what I said before proving that football could go both ways when it comes to eating disorders. Sometimes people look at football and think that only one disorder affects them when more can.

The last thing I’d like to talk about is a Penn State football player that came out about having an eating disorder. His name is Joey Julius wrote on Facebook admitting to not only his depression and anxiety but how he had an eating disorder as well.

http://time.com/4517761/penn-state-football-joey-julius-eating-disorder/

I brought up football because it’s like when I put a volleyball player having a disorder in one of my earlier posts, it’s not something people think about. People usually think gymnastics or dancers to have the worse eating habits when there are sports like football that have athlete’s suffering because of them. I also think that it’s less likely to see males come out about their disorder because society says that they can’t have them.

Society has been a strong topic for athletes and their eating habits and it still relates back to even this. Society tells males that they have to be strong and cannot be weak, eating disorders show a sign of weakness. Football being one of the toughest sports and one of the most popular sports, society makes things up about the players and what they can and cannot do.

Male sports also have disorders and society needs to stop silencing them from announcing that they need help.

So, the next sport I’m going to mention is not a common one and actually a sport that people wouldn’t expect athletes to have an eating disorder in. However, jockeys eating habits are probably one of the worse.

I was recently introduced to horse racing this year and in order to understand it, I had to learn about the weights the horses can hold. According to an article I found on Fox News, horses can hold from 112-122 pounds on them while racing. This includes the jockey and the equipment. I’d also like to point out that the equipment weighs about seven pounds and is pretty light. So in the equipment weighs only seven pounds that must mean that the jockey, at most, weighs 115 pounds.

https://www.foxnews.com/sports/in-kentucky-derby-race-against-weight-takes-jockeys-to-a-dark-side

I’d like to mention that these are grown men that are riding the horses and they starve themselves just, so they could be the lightest and their horse wins. I found another article that talks a little bit more about their eating habits and one of the first lines is so interesting to me.

“Jockeys will engage in very restrictive diets and extreme behaviors in order to meet strict and specific weight requirements,” this is from the eating disorder hope website. Underneath it, it talks about what they do to lose the weight which includes puking, abusing laxitives, skipping meals, and more.

https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/information/body-image/the-dark-side-of-horse-racing-weight-control-in-jockeys

I know a lot of people don’t recognize jockeys and what they do; a lot of people actually don’t even care for their sport, but we should still focus on the fact that their sport probably has a worse eating diet then wrestlers have.

Now both the sports do have requirements for their weight but personally I feel like jockeys have it a little bit worse then wrestlers. I feel like they have to lose more weight and in the first article from Fox News, they can lose up to 10 pounds a day.

I’ve talked about a decent amount of sports in this blog but none of them are this extreme. Gymnastics weighs their athletes but doesn’t force them to lose 10 pounds a day and wrestling has their requirements but again they aren’t losing 10 pounds a day.

It’s important to weigh a certain weight, especially in this because the horses can first off hold only so much weight but second race and be able to win with so much weight on them. However, the weight limit for these grown adults is pretty extreme. Adults shouldn’t be weighing around 115 pounds.

People are aware about jockeys eating habits, it’s not new to them either. It just may be time for someone to do something about a jockey’s eating and change it.

This is a picture of jockey Daniel Porcu.

The warning signs and symptoms are very important to know when it comes to eating disorders. Both athletes and coaches should know about these because of how important they are. In my last post I talked about how eating disorders can affect an athlete’s body while training.

So, I explained what eating disorders can do and here are some of the signs that I found from the National Eating Disorders website. The website is below.

https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/warning-signs-and-symptoms

One of the first things that it brings up is emotion and behavioral symptoms. I did talk in a blog post about how mental illnesses and eating disorders can be related a lot of the times. What I talked about was more about the illnesses but in this one they talk about how people view their body.

A lot of the time, people with eating disorders view their bodies as damaged or don’t see a clear image of their body and what it really looks like. In the website they say that people with eating disorders usually are obsessed with their weight and dieting. They also say that they are usually checking their flaws in appearance a lot of the time. This relates to what I said a little earlier about people viewing their bodies as damaged.

The emotional standpoint of an eating disorder really takes a toll on athletes. Athletes are supposed to be confident when they do things. I say this a lot but I’m an athlete and I personally feel as though my confidence sometimes hides the fact that I’m nervous. It acts as a disguise sometimes for athletes. It’s like the expression “fake it till you make it”. A lot of the times I fake it and then I start to believe it. If an athlete, however, cannot be confident in themselves starting with their bodies then they won’t be confident on a court, field, or floor in front of an audience of people. There was a video that’ll I’ll attach but the volleyball player from one of the first blogs talked about how she was afraid to be in front of a group of people in spandex.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqdbzqpc3QM

The next is physical symptoms, these are a little easier to notice if you are looking for them. This is when an athlete’s weight fluctuates, they have sleep problems, they’re cold all the time, and even more. I think the easiest for coaches to notice with their athletes is the weight changes. You could see if a person is losing weight and whether it’s an excessive amount or just a little.

These are the only symptoms that I’ll go over, but a coach and athlete should go to the National Eating Disorder Website and figure out the signs of an eating disorder.

For this blog post, I’ll be talking about the effects an eating disorder has on the body. People often know of the disorder and know people have it, but some don’t know the long-term effects an eating disorder can have on a person both mentally and physically.

We know that eating disorders affect the body and that not eating enough can’t power a person’s body throughout the day. For athlete’s this is important since they train so often. In my previous post, I talked about an athlete’s diet and how important it is to know and one of the reasons is because it fuels the body.

I looked up what affects eating disorders leave on the body and I found the national eating disorders website. I read through it and a line in it that stuck out the most was “eating disorders can affect every organ system in the body”. Below that gave me examples and I plan to go through a few of them.

Cardiovascular systems are affected because when a person doesn’t eat but works out or even for basic necessities of living, they don’t have enough fuel to power their muscles. Now the tissues are starting to be used as fuel and that affects the heart rate in a body. Soon a person’s pulse will begin to slow down, and this leads to a risk of heart failure.

I feel like cardiovascular is very important to athletes since they are always moving. So, when an athlete isn’t eating, they are destroying their body and tissues inside their bodies probably at a higher rate then those who don’t work out as much.

The next is gastrointestinal system which can be slowed down from not eating or even purging. Purging is a topic that I haven’t brought up really in this, but it is also a part of eating disorders. Purging can cause stomach pain, bacterial infection, blocked intestines, or more. This is only a few things that I decided to name. Another topic that I’ve talked very little about is binge eating which can be common in sports like football. This is actually serious because this can cause a person’s stomach to rupture. There are many other examples for this topic but those I wanted to discuss since they haven’t been mentioned much.

Like I said above binge eating and purging after a meal are also very common with athletes. Binge eating could be known with sports such as football like I said above. Players don’t see it as a disorder because they are usually told to just keep eating and keep gaining weight. I read something one time that explained that an athlete’s performance is not based on their weight so forcing athletes to eat that much is wrong in my opinion. It’s like when I talked about John Geddert weighing his gymnast and treating it as a reward, it’s not right.

Below is the article where I found my information from which has so many more examples of what eating disorders can do to a person’s body.

https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/health-consequences

In my last blog post, I talked about how wrestlers have to have a safe diet or know more about their nutrition than other sports do. I think that it’s important though for all of the sports to know what a healthy diet is for them. In this blog post I’m going to talk about an athlete’s diet and what is considered healthy for them.

Now I do understand that losing some weight isn’t unhealthy. I found this article and on page 58 is talks about how athletes could sometimes use the weight loss to get ahead in their sports. It also says that losing weight requires athletes to look at their diet and how much water they are consuming.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.172.8950&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Like I said above, losing weight for an athlete isn’t unhealthy as long as it’s not an excessive amount of weight loss in a short amount of time. In another article that I found, they said that people who don’t exercise the same amount of athletes usually need about 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day. However, athletes could increase that number by either 500 to 1,000 more calories. This is due to the fact that athletes need to consume the same number of calories that they burn off.

In this same article, it says that calories of course come in different types which can be carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Carbohydrates is a big part of a person’s diet and usually consists of the most calories. Doctors say that 55% to 60% of a diet should be carbohydrates.

Fat is good for skin and hair care but should not be an athlete’s main food source for calories because it makes your body work harder. Doctors say that 30% of a person’s diet should be fats. Last is protein and for the last 10% to 15% protein should be used according to doctors.

The last thing this article talks about is staying hydrated and when to do it. The article says that a person should do it every 15 to 20 minutes but not to drink too much.

https://familydoctor.org/nutrition-for-athletes/

The reason I chose to bring this up is because knowing what an athlete’s diet looks like is just as important as knowing that they have eating disorders. If people start to see what they should be consuming, then maybe it could prevent an eating disorder. Or if coaches and athletes were a little bit more knowledgeable about a diet for someone who works out so often, then maybe that could help prevent eating disorders also. I think that it’s important to know more then to know less especially in this situation.

One of the most well-known sports in the world that controls weight is wrestling. It’s not an easy sport and does require a lot of knowledge in nutrition. Wrestlers and their coaches know how to control their weight and know healthy ways of controlling their weight.

For this blog post I’ve decided to look up a wrestler’s diet and how they lose weight in a healthy manner without just starving themselves. Below is one article that I found that lists healthy ways for the athlete to lose the weight.

https://www.healthychildren.org/English/healthy-living/sports/Pages/Wrestling.aspx

I would like to bring up the last part in the article in how to lose weight in a healthy way. It lists a bunch of things that are not allowed within the sport to lose weight. I also would like to bring up how the article says that athletes are not allowed to lose more than 1.5% of their own body weight each week.

I really question if wrestling is a healthy sport for people. My brother was a wrestler and I remember there were days where he chose not to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family because he had a meet that weekend. Also, even with the list of things that wrestlers are not supposed to use or do to lose weight, who knows if they are actually abiding by that rule in the first place. It says no prolonged fasting but how is fasting in general healthy for a person to do?

In my opinion it isn’t but like the article says it has many different options other than fasting to lose weight. Below is another article that gives more examples as to how wrestlers can lose weight in a healthy way.

https://wrestleclub.com/best-weight-loss-diets-for-wrestling/

In the article it lists a bunch of examples of how a wrestler can lose weight properly while still eating food. It lists food that a wrestler shouldn’t eat and lists the ones that would be best for them to eat.

Now wrestling is one of the toughest and most athletic sports out there in my opinion. It takes a lot for a person to learn about their weight and learn how they can reduce and gain weight in a healthy way but again I ask is this healthy? No other athletes are going out of their way to gain and lose weight in the way that wrestlers have to but, yet they still do it.

People have their opinions about the sport but in reality, it’s a tough question to ask. I believe that there are people out there that are doing it the proper way and that’s most likely a majority of wrestlers, however, there is also probably a small amount that probably starve themselves or purge after they eat.

Like I said I believe wrestling is a great sport and I think it challenges people to their limits but how far is too far for the athletes?