‘I can see your lunch’

Cristina D’Alto

I heard that line a lot by the time I was age 12. It was a menial insult used in ballet class to tell students to stop arching our backs and fix our alignment. Although it was meant to be harmless, the words repeated themselves in my head until they could influence the way I saw my preteen body. I remember my teacher saying that to a girl with a flat stomach and hating my inability to suck in enough to look like her. 

A 2020 study from Michigan State University found that adolescent athletes are more likely to have psychological characteristics of an eating disorder than their non-athlete peers. While there are explanations for this correlation, many researchers agree that perfectionist qualities may be at fault. In such a competitive environment, a perceived need to be flawless in order to succeed metastasizes. To be at the top, athletes feel a duty to keep themselves perfectly in line. As part of this, they whittle themselves down to muscle and bodies ideal for competing — but maybe not for living. Thus, disordered eating and full-blown eating disorders develop in an effort to be the perfect athlete. 

Body-based pressures are not just in athletes’ minds. Rather, disordered eating and body image issues are institutionalized in high-level athletics. The popular Netflix documentary Cheer depicts how restriction can be directly integrated into training. One scene shows flyers — the girls who are tossed into the air — preparing for their routine weigh-in. The college-aged girls express fear of what number will display and explain away their need to stay skinny; they note that it must be easy to lift them. We see how their conviction to stay small reaches extremes when one athlete comes in under 100 pounds. No one tells the girls that they should be scared of gaining weight, but the expectations placed on their bodies back them into a corner. More often than not, an unhealthy relationship with their body develops as they place their value in the hands of the scale. 

Less directly, much of the cause of disordered eating among athletes may be attributed to cultural influences. Athletes are held to a godly regard by fans, the media, and even coaches. With the opportunities of huge earnings and fame, the job demands more than personal success. Instead, it asks for perfectionism in every facet of identity and presentation to the world — including appearance. To be worthy of fandom, our culture tends to ask for grecian beauty. We see this in the modeling industry, but fail to recognize the same mechanisms are at work towards athletes. Eating disorders in athletes therefore aren’t completely about functionality, they are the result of flawed expectations.