The Ubiquity of Eating Disorders in Female Athletes Eating disorders can be found in a lot of people, for many unique reasons. Anyone can acquire them, males and females, children and adults. These disorders are extremely morbid and can critically affect one’s health. Eating disorders are one of the leading effects of disordered eating, which can cause body image issues for anyone that acquires one. These disorders have a number of factors that could cause them. However, the prevalence of these disorders unfortunately appears to occur most frequently in female athletes. The pressure of sports and media seems to result in eating disorders in female athletes.
Female teenagers anticipate weight gain during puberty, which can impact their
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Which can lead to producing nutritional deficiencies. Often, these cases involve getting a medical opinion. Inside of aesthetic sports, physical appearance is key to form a judges opinion. Physical characteristics of this sport may include: long legs, thinness, toned legs, small bust, and small waist. It is also important for coaches to monitor their athletes weight in these sports. Rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, artistic gymnastics, and dance are all aesthetic sports. Heidi Noelle Gunther, Chloe Luksiak, Nadia Comaneci, Simone Biles, Yulia Lipnitskaia, and Nancy Kerrigan are all aesthetic sport athletes that had eating disorders.
Endurance sports have a certain brutality. These athletes have to consume a crazy amount of calories just to stay energized. If some of these calorie requirements are not met, it could lead to a fatal injury. Endurance sports are distance running, swimming, cross-country skiing, and cycling. Amanda Beard, Dagny Knutson, Alice Merryweather, Jessie Diggins, Amber Schulz, and Allie Ostrander are all athletes in endurance sports that struggled with eating
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Category one includes biological factors such as: age, genetics, pubertal timing, and the body mass index (BMI). Psychological factors such as emotional intelligence, parental attachment, body image dissatisfaction, negative mood states, low self-esteem, personality traits, and sociocultural factors like peer pressure to conform to an unrealistic standard of thinness, eating disorders in the family and bullying. The second category of potential factors is sports specific. The factors are frequent weight regulation; dieting and external pressure of weight loss; lack of nutrition knowledge, energy requirements, and fluid needs; fast food dining, lack of food prep; overtraining, perfectionism; starting training early; injuries and sports regulations; impact of coaches behavior; and desire to be lean for performance. Body ideals and body norms and myths that exist in the sport are huge factors of eating disorders.
The theme of stereotyping is to the community that supports being skinny and accepts restrictive eating and everexcessive training. Body image dissatisfaction and disordered eating are not put on the individual themselves. It comes from a number of factors and pressure from coaches, teammates, and media. Progressing physical activity and sports science have brought scientists attention to conditioning aids. Old beliefs still exist, but old myths have been dismissed to open new doors for more helpful