Own Your Athlete Body - protect yourself from harm.

Due to the pressures within the sport environment, such as coaches, teammates, competitors, uniforms and judges, every athlete is at risk for developing unhealthy eating practices to lose weight or to change body size/shape in order to become more competitive and to meet societal and sport-related physique ideals. 

But not all athletes struggle.
Why is it that some athletes refuse to diet or conform to an idealized body image but others end up in a dangerous place of disordered eating and extreme exercise?

• Advice from coaches - Many coaches connect the ability to change body composition to that of hard work, discipline and commitment to sport. Coaches (and onlookers) will often applaud athletes who can reduce body fat to exceptionally low levels. How many times have you heard an athlete, coach or commentator say that an athlete looks race ready by referencing body size, shape or appearance? Comments made by coaches, social media, body shaming, fat talk, attributing poor performances on weight, and low self-esteem can initiate or intensify underlying body image concerns. It's not uncommon that many athletes (and coaches) believe that body weight is determining factor of athletic success. Even worse, many coaches attribute a poor athletic performance to weight. A coach who has an underlying obsession with weight will only intensify an athlete’s body image concerns. 
  
  
• Body dissatisfaction - How often do you “size up” your competition based on a look of exceptional fitness?  Considering that body dissatisfaction is normalized in our society, it’s not surprising to learn that one of the main contributors to dieting, disordered eating or an eating disorder is body dissatisfaction. Body dissatisfaction (or poor body image) refers to unhappiness with the shape, size or weight of one’s body or appearance. Interestingly, negative thoughts about one’s body tend to develop (and strengthen) from body comparison. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to establish your level of body dissatisfaction based on how your body shape/size compares to that of another athlete? 
  
  
• Pursuing a race weight - The idea behind a “race weight” mentality stems from a belief that your body will perform the best at a certain weight. More often than not, this weight is often less than your healthy, set point weight. A low body weight (or body fat percentage) is perceived as a biomechanical advantage. This belief leads many athletes to work diligently hard to achieve a physical body type to fit sport instead of letting the body develop and improve as a result of sport. In other words, instead of letting your body unintentionally change from the effects of proper nutrition to support consistent training, you are led to believe that with some hard work (aka dieting), you can override genes, hormones, age, fitness level and other physiological mechanisms to achieve an arbitrary number on the scale that will guarantee peak performance. In a race for leanness, many athletes succumb to unhealthy and extreme weight loss behaviors. As a result, in the attempt to improve performance, performance and health are sabotaged. 
  
  
• Deep in diet culture - No matter who you are, diet culture wants you to feel like you have complete control over your body image. Happiness and feeling good about yourself is not something that you need to earn by achieving a specific body weight, size or shape through dieting. Food should never be conditional. Diet culture is trying to compromise one of your most special relationships – the one that you have with your body and food. Dieting is a form of starvation. Whether it’s overexercising, undereating or a combination of both, you are in a losing fight against your biology. When you are underfed, undernourished or underfueled, your brain will obsess over food until you “give in.” Your body is extremely smart. Whether you like it or not, your body has powerful biological mechanisms which are triggered when your body does not receive the energy it needs from food. You may feel like you are addicted to certain foods but this is your body’s way of driving you to eat the calories that it needs to function. The pattern of weight loss and weight gain from dieting is called weight cycling. This constant yo-yo dieting is in and of itself an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, inflammation and high blood pressure. This cycle is more harmful to your mental and physical health than maintaining a higher, but stable, body weight. There’s nothing wrong with adopting new behaviors to improve your health, performance or well-being. If anything, it’s encouraged! But health is not synonymous with size. Peak performance is built from changing your physiology, not your weight. Regardless of the incentive, intentional undereating (especially when you are very active) is hazardous to your well-being. It can’t be stated enough but anytime you are engaged in some form of intentional food restriction (often for the sake of shrinking your body or maintaining a fantasy body), you are buying into diet culture which is packed with false promises and unrealistic claims. Pursuing a restrictive style of eating will keep you on a roller coaster of mental, emotional and health struggles as you become more out of touch with your hunger and satisfaction cues.
  

It's no secrete that many athletes struggle with body image. But what about elite and professional athletes....do they deal with the same issues?
→Are Olympians afraid of becoming too muscular?
→Do they feel pressure from coaches to lose weight?
→Do they worry about weight?
→Do they have days when they don't feel good in their own skin?
→What about nutrition - do Olympians follow a strict diet plan?

Many athletes struggle with eating enough to support the energy demands of training and wanting to look a certain way. When the pressure is so great to achieve a specific body composition, it's not uncommon for restrictive or extreme eating strategies to compromise physical health, mental well-being and athletic performance.

It's not about the look of your body but what you can do with your body.

I hope you can take some time out of your day to listen to this raw, enlightening and educational discussion with Katie Zaferes. As a female athlete at the top level of her sport, she discusses how she fuels and eats for performance, how she deals with body image dissatisfaction as well as her tips for how to build better body confidence.

If you'd like to listen to the interview, here's the audio file:
Interview - audio file.

Body image at the elite level - Live Chat with Olympian Katie Zaferes

Mark your calendars for a live broadcast discussion with 2019 ITU series overall champion, Olympian triathlete Katie Zaferes. 

It's no secrete that many athletes struggle with body image. But what about elite and professional athletes....do they deal with the same issues? Are Olympians afraid of becoming too muscular? Do they feel pressure from coaches (and the media) to be lean on race day? Do they worry about weight?

Every athlete wants to perform at his/her best when it matters the most...on event day. But in certain sports, there is a lot of pressure to look a certain way - to reach a body type that's "ideal." Many athletes struggle with eating enough to support the energy demands of training and wanting to look a certain way. Alongside a misbelief that lower body weight (or body fat) improves performance, many athletes desire a change in body composition due to the display of their bodies in a tight or revealing uniform. When the pressure is so great to achieve a specific body composition, it's not uncommon for restrictive or extreme eating strategies to compromise health and fitness. 

Body image issues are nothing new in the world of aesthetic sports like running, triathlon, cycling and swimming. Often times, the look of the body that is healthy and well-fueled does not match the image of the body that you think you need for sport. 

The topics of body image, weight and body composition can be triggering for many athletes. Inundated with wrong messages from coaches and nutrition experts, along with high expectations and feeling a lot of pressure to perform, it's not uncommon for athletes to slip into disordered eating patterns. 

But this doesn't mean that every athlete feels dissatisfied with his/her body image. Body confidence is part of what helps athletes achieve athletic dreams. Therefore, I find it extremely important to educate athletes on fostering a better sense of self worth. 

With so much pressure to "lose" weight, we need to shift the conversation from loss to gain. 
Gaining power, endurance, resilience, strength....and most importantly, 

GAINING BODY CONFIDENCE.

An athlete is more than a body. 
The strengths gained from sport are more than just physical. 

I hope you can join me on Thursday evening at 6:30pm EST at Trimarni Coaching and Nutrition for an enlightening discussion on body image at the elite level with Olympian Katie Zaferes.