eating disorders in college

parkside wrote:

How's this: a girl on my team (that I KNOW did not eat more than 1 piece of fruit all day and had the fuzz on her arms) collapsed once on the sidewalk in the middle of her long run. We had a team meeting after that. About getting help for illnesses that can harm your body for life? NO, OUR MEETING WAS ABOUT NOT RUNNING BY YOURSELF SO THAT IF YOU PASS OUT, SOMEONE IS THERE WITH YOU. True story. We had weekly weigh ins and unfortunately that girl when she ran was one of our faster girls. Like mentioned before though, she did end up with quite a lot of injuries and never made it past college running.

Wow. That is unbelievable.

I only ran college for a semester, and I was the slowest girl by far and honestly didn't even deserve to be on the team. But I remember we did weight training and BF testing, and that in itself was fine. I was the second fattest girl (19.8%) and there was one girl who had a little more body fat than I had, but it was just her build, and she was faster than I was anyways. The head coach told her she needed to lose weight. She was hysterical about it. It was awful.

And there was at least one girl whom I suspect had an ED, but I don't feel comfortable accusing her of that without knowing her better. I just remember her walking into the locker room with some sushi after practice, like six pieces. She ate one or two and then said "oh I'm so fully, does anyone want some sushi" and insisted that we all take the rest from her. Kind of a huge red flag. AFAIK nobody brought it up to anyone else but who knows, I wasn't really in the loop.

More coaches really need to freaking learn how to deal with and help prevent this stuff.