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

calling it wrote:

"Disordered eating". Probably an obsession with "trying to eat healthy" and consequently not getting enough calories to counter the training load. This is probably way more common than an actual eating disorder.

I'm just glancing down the first page, so sorry if this has been mentioned already, but there is actually going to be a new diagnosis in the DSM-V (the most recent update on the manual psychologists use to diagnose mental health problems). The new diagnosis is being referred to as 'orthorexia' referring to a need for perfection/order in eating habits to the point that it becomes detrimental to other aspects of health. It hsa undergone a lot of research before going into the DSM. It is highly comorbid with eating disorders, depression, and OCD. I suspect it is a more refined, more accurate assessment of what a lot of female (and some male) endurance athletes have.

yo tell me whatya want wrote:

At 115 lbs and a height of 5'9"-5'10", Goethal's BMI is about 17.0. She is still anorexic by definition. This is gross. The article is supporting a problem and not "supporting healthy female athletes".

Earlier this year, I saw her take 15 minutes at a cafe by the Dempsey to choose an orange and a tea for lunch. Maybe it's because she was with Lindsay Flannagan that she is convinced that this behavior is normal. 4200 calories? I seriously doubt it. She wouldn't be toting around Powerade Zero at every meet if that was the case.

Healthy people don't have sallow skin and legs that look like sinew. Doubt she can menstruate at that weight without hormonal therapy/birth control.

QFE.

Here we have an eye witness account of the eating habits of Goethals.

Based on this, she was not eating 3000 calories, which I am skeptical of anyway. And her diet is crap. Tea, an orange, and forcing down fatty foods is no way to eat. In fact it sounds like the treatment is worse than the cure. But who knows because the whole thing is hush hush and the outward facade is that everything's fine.

The bottom line is that her eating habits are not good.

She needs to eat enough calories, and of healthy food, not just anything.

"Over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives."

Correction: more than 50% of teen girls have disordered eating, though not technically an eating disorder

But:

"25% of college-aged women engage in bingeing and purging as a weight-management technique"

The above quotes from:

http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/

"At least one-third of female athletes have some type of disordered eating, according to two studies of college athletes done by eating disorder experts, one in 1999 by Craig Johnson of the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital in Tulsa and another in 2002 by Katherine Beals, now at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City."

But the numbers are higher in sports like distance running:

"Female athletes who seem especially vulnerable to disordered eating and excessive exercise are in either the "thin-build sports" or activities that require a lean body weight, such as long-distance running, gymnastics, swimming, diving, figure skating, dance, cheerleading, wrestling and lightweight rowing, says Beals, author of Disordered Eating Among Athletes.

Source of above:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-02-05-women-health-cover_x.htm

Different stats:

"The Massachusetts Eating Disorders Association cites the following statistics on college student eating disorders:

•• 15% of women 17 to 24 have eating disorders

•• 40% of female college students have eating disorders

•• 91% of female college students have attempted to control their weight through dieting"

from:

http://www.waldenbehavioralcare.com/eating_disorders_among_college_students.asp

yo tell me whatya want wrote]

At 115 lbs and a height of 5'9"-5'10", Goethal's BMI is about 17.0. She is still anorexic by definition. This is gross. The article is supporting a problem and not "supporting healthy female athletes".

Earlier this year, I saw her take 15 minutes at a cafe by the Dempsey to choose an orange and a tea for lunch. Maybe it's because she was with Lindsay Flannagan that she is convinced that this behavior is normal. 4200 calories? I seriously doubt it. She wouldn't be toting around Powerade Zero at every meet if that was the case.

Healthy people don't have sallow skin and legs that look like sinew. Doubt she can menstruate at that weight without hormonal therapy/birth control.

Why did you spend 15 minutes of your life focusing on what ssomeone else was choosing for lunch? Don't obsess on other people's behavior and don't spend time wondering about their menstrual cycles.

An intelligent person notices and processes a lot of seemingly extraneous information without even trying, and can do so while eating lunch or conducting other daily activities. It does not mean s/he is obsessed--just observant and mentally sharp. And I don't think it would be odd for someone to be curious about what a super skinny person will put on her tray in the cafeteria.

He saw her grabbing a quick bite to eat with a friend and is ready to diagnose her with mental disorders. Good thing this guy didn't see me eating carrots and drinking water earlier today.

No need to diagnose her with a disorder--that was already done by an entire team of professionals and Megan herself. Furthermore, her story and diagnosis of OCD and disordered eating was published in several news articles. What an individual puts out in the media for public consumption is fair game for discussion and analysis by strangers.

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.

People who have "disordered eating" (or a full-blown eating disorder) often cut out fat and protein, which are more complex for the gut to digest than carbohydrates. When you cut out protein/fat, the body down-regulates the enzymes needed to digest them. When you add them back in, the body has a difficult time digesting them because of the down-regulated enzymes. It has to be a gradual process of adding them back in, so the gut can naturally upregulate enzyme production.

It's called sitting at a coffee shop/cafe during at the Washington rec gym during an indoor meet. It's pretty unusual to take 15 minutes to stare at the options and then not even get anything besides 50 calories worth of food. I didn't go out of my way to stalk the girl, but everyone here talks about how she's anorexic all the time, so I couldn't help judge what I was seeing.

The behavior was weird. The food choices were low cal. Her booty is concave. People will make assumptions.

Apparently Goethals reads LetsRun a lot. Just saying.

Hopefully, she doesn't read these boards at all anymore. I think if I were the coach of elite high school or college athletes, the first thing I would tell them would be to stay out of these type of forums. People will be your friend today and your enemy tomorrow.

With that said, I think back in high school it was pretty blatant that she had eating problems. You can tell the difference between healthy thin and sickly thin. If I were a college coach, I would not have recruited her.

Hopefully she keeps improving with both her physical and mental health.

I hope she's Ok for good now, and that people/coaches take an active interest and speak up about health of all runners, independent of past or current success.

Like others, I was confused by the whole 3000kcal/day thing, which doesn't seem woefully insufficient. But, I suppose if you're short ~500kcal/day, you could lose a pound in a week, and then 10 lbs in 2.5 months.

An insidious but constant weight loss.

Only thanks to the post about orthorexia, I think I get it...

But, did she not maintain weight because the hunger response didn't work; digestion was impaired (from already-low weight or sickness or stress); or the eating was so scheduled and regimented as a way to maintain control?

Just trying to understand the problem generally: clarity could help other runners and coaches identify this problem.

I understand that. I framed my comment to reflect the fact that we are not the mainstream (non-running) populace who nowadays considers 5'9" and 150 lbs as "skinny".

Trollist wrote:

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.

Tim Noakes, M.D., wrote:

My interest in exercise and weight control began some years ago when a leading runner told me that I was too fat and advised me to set my treadmill on manual and spend my days running, not testing other runners. I suspect that many elite runners share this view and picture me as a potential sumo wrestler.

My medical colleagues, on the other hand, have usually considered me too thin and have enquired for what political cause I am currently on hunger strike. Others ask which diet I am experimenting with. Still others gratuitously offer me their valued medical services; they are intrigued to discover the nature of my terminal illness.

from Lore of Running, 3rd edition (1991), p.581

I know her and her family a little bit and I've just got a bad feeling about this, meaning I think it's going to take some more time and help. She had a lot of time and energy over years invested in what she had become and I'm afraid it didn't really going to change in a few months.

Remember, this is back in fall of '10 now and into last spring. It's a year later and she's still having her ups and downs and still doesn't look healthy. She hasn't had a major crash again and glad for that. Still needs help, though, and hope she'll get some.

Eating disorders in the female running community are not going to decline as long as girls with known eating disorders are allowed to keep running for top programs. People always look for short-cuts to success, and this is one of them. For a while, being extra thin will get you over those hilly xc courses faster. Girls can and do experience success with this short-cut. They can earn scholarships and win titles for themselves and their teams. But they are doing long-term damage to their emotional and physical health. Allowing them to keep running is like allowing a football player to keep playing with a bad concussion.

For the record, the above is not specifically about this situation, since it's unclear to me what Megan's health status is. But if you look around the NCAA, there are girls that look like odd little gnomes with normal to large heads but shrunken bodies and you've got to wonder.