How can coaches affect an athlete’s diet?

Hello everyone and welcome back! For this post, I’ve decided to talk about how society isn’t the only thing that influences athletes to have eating disorders. A lot of the time it’s the coaches that they have at the current time.

I am an athlete and I can speak for my sport through both word of mouth and experience, that coaches have the largest impact on our diets. I trained with a girl that my old coach would constantly call overweight. It got to the point where she didn’t feel comfortable in a leotard to train or even compete. Other gyms have coaches that weigh all of their athletes in front of each other.

Now what I’m saying isn’t that they are the only reason why athletes have eating disorders. A lot of the time they’re helping the athlete get through a disorder. They usually have a positive impact on the athlete. However, there are some occasions where they don’t have a positive impact.

I found this article about an old elite gymnast, Kamerin Moore, that went to Twistars Gymnastics. It’s one of the most successful gyms in the nation and has sent several athletes to the Olympics and all of their athletes have continued on to college. The article is below.

https://deadspin.com/former-elite-gymnast-kamerin-moore-learns-to-take-back-1827319050

In the article she goes on to talk about how Geddert continually weighed her and her teammates. He would punish them if they were overweight and reward them if they had lost weight. She also mentions how she was uncomfortable with her body for many years after that.

I have a teammate her has attended Twistars and she confirmed that he did have weighing days. She said it was usually on Saturday morning practices when all of the girls would go to the back room and get weighed. She also told me that even while she was in a full leg cast, she was told she needed to lose weight.

This blog post is not meant to insult the sport of gymnastics at all but instead is to show that coaches do have influences in athlete’s weight. This happens in many different sports such as wrestling for example. Wrestling is a common sport where athletes are required to lose or gain weight in short periods of time.

That’s all I have to share for this post. Join in again to talk about how this act from coaches can turn in to something bigger like abuse towards the athlete.