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.
Eating Disorders within our Sports 