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.
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.
Eating Disorders within our Sports 