Unleashed: Megan Goethals Is At Peace. Finally. She was under 100lbs!

yo tell me whatya want wrote:

My previous comment was deleted by the mods, but the gist was:

Goethals is 115 lbs and 5'9"-5'10", which is a BMI of about 17.0. I am not sure why everyone is praising her and the Washington program for achieving "good health". A BMI of under 18.5 is clinically underweight and someone with a BMI under 17.5 is defined by the medical community as anorexic (whether she has anorexia nervosa, the mental component is irrelevant to this point).

Obviously, this is an improvement over her previous BMI of 14.xx, but it is still not okay. And it's gross that there would be a press release praising it.

You are absolutely ignorant to the situation. That fact is just simply a general basis for the population. Everybody is different and to be good there is a fine line between what is considered healthy and unhealthy to the average general population. Not elite women distance running.

This is a very important subject, far more important than running. Megan Goethals is just one example, really. This is about the rest of us, the message we give to women and girls. We like to say that we care about their health and don't want them to get too thin, but the thinner they become the more we applaud. For women runners, faster AND thinner gets the applause. Not always in that order.

Goethals is running again, I wonder if the psychiatrist considers her healthy.

I read about this in RT back in October,

the whole article struck a wrong chord with me. Like this:

So supposedly Metcalf was right and all these other coaches were wrong. Yet Goethals made it just two months as a freshman before requiring a full-blown medical intervention.

Or this:

:(

I could go on and on. The UW article makes an even worse impression. Finally, both of these articles jump to the conclusion that because she is running fast, her troubles are behind her. This ignores the fact that she was running fast in high school while digging herself a hole then. Maybe she is fine, time will tell.

Excellent post.

Great post. I hate how people act like the message board posters calling out obviously starving athletes are in the wrong. Imagine if Derek Jeter suddenly weighed 125 pounds - wouldn't everyone be talking about how unhealthy he looked? And rightfully so, because he'd be killing himself. Yet, somehow it's terrible to talk about how scary thin certain runners are. What about the awful example these runners set? What do you think younger female runners think when they see skeletons winning national championships? This is a serious problem within running, and the tendency to look the other way isn't helping.

If runners, who consider 120 lb men and 100 lb Africans as gods, consider someone as too darn skinny, then something is very likely wrong. Our "glasses" are indeed skewed...in favor of the super-lean. But we know sickly when we see it.

"Her stomach began its assault in earnest last September. Deprived of enough fat, enough food, with anxiety and a calorie-sucking 75-miles-a-week summer to boot, the nerves and stomach lining didn't know quite what to do with themselves. So they grew listless, got lazy. And when good, fatty food made its way in again, her stomach erupted in gut-twisting cramps because it took too much work to break down. Megan Goethals had dug herself a hole."

This quote of the Running Times story bothers me. If you were eating 3000 calories a day, why would your stomach become lazy and have a hard time breaking food down? I thought this only happened to starving people.

Balzac wrote:

when good, fatty food made its way in again, her stomach erupted in gut-twisting cramps because it took too much work to break down

Fatty food is not good, and force feeding her fatty food is not a solution.

Balzac wrote:

This quote of the Running Times story bothers me. If you were eating 3000 calories a day, why would your stomach become lazy and have a hard time breaking food down? I thought this only happened to starving people.

She was eating 3000 LITERAL calories/day, not the colloquial 3000 "calories" which are actually kilocalories. So she was eating 3 conventionial calories per day. But no eating disorder, mind you.

suede-denim secret police wrote:

If runners, who consider 120 lb men and 100 lb Africans as gods, consider someone as too darn skinny, then something is very likely wrong. Our "glasses" are indeed skewed...in favor of the super-lean. But we know sickly when we see it.

Those 120lbs. men are 5'3" and the 100lbs. women are 4'10". Megan Goethals is on the higher end of 5 feet. I'm not sure exactly how tall she is, but 100lbs. for someone 4'10" and someone 5'9" are not the same thing.

She wasn't eating 3 kilocalories a day silly. They mean she was eating 3000 kilocalories (which they, and all of refer to as calories a day) and that might be low for that amount of mileage. Three kilocalories a day is not eating at all- as in hunger strike.

She was not eating 3000 calories, or if she was, she probably had bulemia. My girlfriend has an eating disorder and eats 400 calories in addition to working out an hour a day. 3000 calories is about perfect for someone her size running 80 mpw.

"This happened to someone I know, therefore that standard applies in all other situations."

fatty food is not good wrote:

Fatty food is not good

That's not exactly accurate

yo tell me whatya want wrote:

My previous comment was deleted by the mods, but the gist was:

Goethals is 115 lbs and 5'9"-5'10", which is a BMI of about 17.0. I am not sure why everyone is praising her and the Washington program for achieving "good health". A BMI of under 18.5 is clinically underweight and someone with a BMI under 17.5 is defined by the medical community as anorexic (whether she has anorexia nervosa, the mental component is irrelevant to this point).

Obviously, this is an improvement over her previous BMI of 14.xx, but it is still not okay. And it's gross that there would be a press release praising it.

Some people are healthy and have a low BMI. It sounds like Goethals comes from a family like this. The article mentioned that she is trying to reach 120 lbs, which may actually be healthy for her, regardless of the arbitrary cutoffs created by the medical community. She should be praised for making the effort to get healthy and for putting up with judgmental commentaries about her body.

Your post is much more vicious and gross than the article. The article actually does a nice job of touching upon the serious nutrition and eating problems that may occur among runners without anorexia nervosa.

And the "calorie-deficit OCD" behavior wasn't a problem until she was racing poorly. I would imagine if she had been racing well many would have ignored what was obviously dangerous to her health.

According to the June Running Times (p.71), Mary Keitany is 88 pounds at 5'0". That's a BMI of 17.2. I presume she is healthy since she has been a top performer for 5 years. That doesn't prove anything about Megan Goethals, but it is evidence that a low BMI can be healthy for a female runner.

These situations are probably more complicated for a team to handle than we think. To avoid lawsuits and privacy violations, university staff probably can't single out a particular athlete for medical testing/nutritional or psychological counseling just because they think she looks dangerously thin. They probably have to make all the girls get their heart, BMI, bone density, etc. tested in order to check on the one they're actually worried about, unless the girl collapses or something.

Secondly, it's complicated for concerned teammates to say anything. It's not their business, they may not be good friends with the person, and they assume the coaching and medical staff are or should be on top of it. Also, any comments can be viewed as stemming from jealousy. On a friend's team, this freshman girl showed up as an xc walk-on and beat many of the recruited girls. But she looked unhealthily thin. The girls were really unhappy about her representing the team looking like that, but were afraid of it seeming like sour grapes if they talked to the coaches. In fact, the jealousy accusation got thrown around when one girl did make a comment. Meanwhile, the coaches had little incentive to stop her from running when she was doing well. Within 2 months she was in the hospital for a dangerously low heart rate due to anorexia. But they only made her take a few weeks off to recover and she was back for spring season. Wow.

Lastly, more than 50% of college girls have eating disorders, and among runners the percentages are higher. So if a coach were to make all his girls with active eating disorders or managed disorders stop running, he wouldn't have team. Meanwhile, normally slender girls who get their periods but don't look like skeletons, can have a really tough time competing because they are carrying around more weight. To them, eating disorders seem like a form of cheating. Like doping or cheating in school, ED's usually comes back to bite the person in the form of stress fractures or heart problems or mono, but in the mean time they often have terrific success.

And heck,

...I HATE that there's no edit function! Sorry about the fragment above.

There is no way that 50% of college freshmen have eating disorders. 50% of college freshmen are overweight!