Girls wellness project

As sports has many positives effects for students in school, like teamwork and collaborative skills, as well as being constantly active, which often times can relieve stress, one of the negative effects to sports can be eating disorders. This is more common for females in sports, as most competitive female physical activities are known for their ‘perfect’ and ‘thin’ athletes. This stereotype has shaped female sports, and in a way, raised expectations for body shapes when being active. Many girls look down on themselves, no matter how they look when they compare themselves to someone else, and therefore view their body-image as not enough.  Surrounding yourself with other athletes every day can influence these thoughts, and lead to extremes like restrictive diets. In addition to the heavy pressure in sports, a common misconception that many females follow is that the thinner you are the better you are at sports performance and endurance. In addition, most female athletes that wear uniforms in sports like swim, dance, and cheer, tend to struggle with their appearance NO MATTER their size.

There are many other ways that sports cause the start of eating disorders, but what’s important is how to stop thinking in these ways and prevent this when playing sports. One way that may change your mindset is that a healthy meal before playing sports will enhance your physical abilities, and therefore make you play better. At the end of the day, it’s not how you look, it’s how you play, your main focus should be improvement in skill, and being active often can lead to weight loss at a steady and healthy pace as you start to form muscle. For those that have already struggled from this restrictive eating and are looking for ways to recover, start with a light training load, and as the recovery progresses so will you’re training. This slowly ascending progress will eventually serve as a reward to yourself and could help you fully recover. Lastly, it goes without saying that coaches may hold this kind of ideal pressure on you, and cause competitiveness between you and your teammates, making it hard to NOT try to look the best and be the best. But at the end of the day, as cheesy as this sounds, just think about YOU. Self-criticizing is one of the main reasons that lead to eating disorders  and constantly surrounding yourself with other girls playing sports that are your age might not help; however, “comparison is a thief of joy”. Going on with this, try to find a fun habit that doesn’t make you think about sports on your days off. Constantly thinking about sports will impact these toxic thoughts, so taking your mind off of the pressure sports may carry, is healthy. Also, find your click within sports, find friends that make you feel good about yourself. This will not only be healthy, but also make playing sports more fun, getting your mind off of comparison. All in all, being healthy in sports is not bad, but taking it to extremes like eating disorders can lead to extreme risks and make your healthy goal, turn to not healthy really quick. Just truly own it!

-Kayla (volunteer)