Hi everyone and welcome back! Last time we discussed how Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson was affected by an eating disorder. To refresh your memory, after she starred in Dancing with the Stars, blogs and articles were written about her body and how it wasn’t right and that she should be skinnier. The articles had a toll on Shawn and she starts to fall into a state of depression thinking she wasn’t good enough for people. So, for this blog post I decided to write about how eating disorders can lead to serious mental illnesses.
Like discussed earlier, Shawn fell in to a depression after tabloids or different articles told the world that her body wasn’t good enough. Another example was Victoria Garrick from the second blog I wrote. She was on the USC women’s volleyball team and she mentions how her mental state got so bad that she would be okay with a car hitting her and her being in a hospital for a while.
Things like these aren’t safe for not only athletes but everyone to be thinking. No one should ever feel like they’re body isn’t good enough and think it so much that they would be okay with getting hit with a car just to get out of practicing or eating.
Above is an article that I found on Google Scholar. It talks about how eating disorders can be an “extreme verson of masked depression”. This meaning that eating disorders are a way for people to show their depression.
A lot of the time we see a connection between eating disorders and depression. I looked up the definition of depression and the website below says that it is a serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think, and how you act.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression
It then goes on to explain some symptoms of depression. One of the symptoms is changes in appetite meaning the two can be related. It’s clear to see that they can be connected and that they have a past of intersecting in multiple different situations.
In my personal opinion, I don’t think that athletes are looking at the bigger picture when it comes to eating disorders and that’s not their fault. They can’t help but look at how they need to please the people around them and if that means not eating to look the way people want them to look then so be it. However, the bigger picture of eating disorders is that it can ruin them. I listed to women who had eating disorders and later noticed that they were in a state of depression and probably didn’t even notice.
For my next blog post, I will go into how society isn’t the only thing influencing athletes to have eating disorders. Sometimes it’s the people around them such as family members, friends, or even their coaches. So, check in next time to hear how they are influenced by others to make their decisions. Thanks for checking in!
Eating Disorders within our Sports 