Fueling an Athlete... and the Fire

Collegiate athletes are high-performing machines: each part of their body is fine-tuned to help generate jaw-dropping performances.

Most days start with an early morning lift before the sun rises, followed by a mid-morning conditioning or film session, then a standard practice around mid-day and of course recovery to end the day to ensure their machines, er bodies, are in peak form. Phew.

Then do it again the next day. And the next. And the day after that, too.

It is a rinse and repeat kind of operation.

All well-run machines require fuel to run efficiently. For humans, the fuel is food. Quite literally, the calories from what people eat power everything the human body does: breathing, talking, walking, thinking and playing sports.

Of course, humans are not actually machines. But those last two verbs are especially important: thinking and playing sports.

“It was like one of the hardest battles mentally I've ever had,” Bailey Ferrer, a former gymnast at Louisiana State University says.

That may be the best word to describe what happens when a machine breaks down because of internal happenings: a battle.

“It was like, I'm so hungry and I have no energy to do anything,” Ferrer adds. “I was so malnourished and I was like, I need to eat. But then I was like, Oh my God, if I eat a piece of chocolate, it will put fat on me or I'm going to feel bloated. You know logically what you need to do, but even though you know the logic, it's hard to get yourself to do it.”

Eating disorders among college-aged females are like a double-edged sword right now: diagnoses are at a fearfully high level, and the heightened number of patients are entering doctor's offices with more severe symptoms. Researchers at Maynooth Univeristy found the risk of developing food-related illnesses rose 13 percentage points from 2013-2022 in a study in November 2022. Whether it be a result of the increase in social media usage, the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic or the unrealistic expectations society pushes onto women from a young age, the problem is egregious: nearly all of respondents in the Female Athlete and Body Image (2023) survey reported struggling with body image-related issues, with a majority beginning as early as middle school.

When do you first remember struggling with body image and food as an athlete?

College-aged girls can scroll endlessly watching “What I Eat in a Day” videos and comparing themselves to celebrities taking drugs meant for diabetes in order to lose weight.

The pandemic forced the same group of girls to stay at home with little to do and an endless amount of time to workout or make healthy recipes to avoid the “quarantine fifteen!”

And again.

The same group of girls maturated in a society where Victoria Secret’s fashion shows were must-watch TV.

The rise in eating disorders is more likely than not a combination of all three— social media, the pandemic and society's ideal image of female's bodies— along with individual experiences. A group that shares a common conflict when it comes to the relationship between body image and food, notably, is collegiate female athletes.

“It is a struggle of balancing looking really strong and muscular as a female athlete to feel empowered, but also fitting this societal stigma of what a female should look like: thin and ripped,” says Nicole Nourse, a senior beach volleyball player at the University of Southern California.

It is almost a direct contrast between the world of women’s athletics and the stigma Nicole Nourse refers to: social media algorithms generally push forward mainstream influencers’ content over female athletes, and female sports did not earn prime-time TV slots until recently. Essentially, female athletes in college do not see a lot of women with muscular, more built bodies like their own on social platforms.

Haylin Harris, a graduate golfer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has seen numerous teammates across her five years in collegiate athletics grapple with the dilemma of what has become the standard body on social media and what is the necessary body to perform well in their sport.

“You just kind of get models just thrown in your face,” Haylin Harris says. “It's not talked about enough, the favorable body shape. I definitely think if [social media] portrayed more strong, really muscular female athletes that would definitely help with the insecurities of looking strong."

It is equally important to note that there is not one “look” for a person grappling with an eating disorder. An athlete may be strong and have a body fat percentage that falls within the standard range, yet still struggle with disordered eating habits. They may manifest, for example, in the form of incessant thoughts about food or anxiety when there is a the lack of control over food— both internal fights that can be easy to hide.

Weight suppression, or the difference between an individual’s highest weight in adulthood compared to their current weight, has the potential to limit an athlete’s potential just as much as a starving body. Both sides of the spectrum reveal themselves in similar ways, namely lower energy and decreased performance.

Lauren Link, Director of Sports Nutrition at Purdue University, recognizes that regardless of why an individual is underweight, it is common to want to restrict to avoid becoming too “bulky.” So, she hones in on the education behind muscle building when athletes come in as freshman to ensure positive habits from the start.

“We have a lot of female athletes who are afraid of getting bulky,” Link says. “We as women can want to gain muscle because that's going to help promote being good and effective at our sport. But we don't have the testosterone levels that men have. You're not going to bulk up and be like Popeye.”

Let’s revisit the idea of collegiate athletes as machines. They require lots of fuel, or food, to sustain high-level performance. Pair a high-caloric diet with intense weight training, and that fuel starts to go towards building a broader chest, more robust legs.

“I think [college] was the first time that our body started developing a lot of muscle, like in our shoulders,” Audrey Nourse, who plays beach volleyball with her twin sister Nicole at USC says. “I'd wear a tank top going out and I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, I really look like a bodybuilder.'"

Just as there is no one size fits all for body types, there is no one size fits all for why or how athletes experience extreme weight loss. For some it stems from a place of innocence, for others it is the nature of the sport.

Yet all athletes, to a certain extent, carry perfectionist tendancies and wish to minimize errors while playing. This high level of discipline and motivation helps them achieve great feats, but grows into a critical issue when it disseminates into other areas of life— namely food.

“Many are overly focused on ‘clean eating,’ which often backfires for their performance goals,” Wendy Sterling, a certified eating disorder registered dietitian and a board-certified specialist in sports dietetics says. “We see that this type of eating results in rigidity, and often results in an energy imbalance which has negative performance consequences that affect recovery, stamina, immune function, energy, risk of injury, explosiveness and more.”

It is not only the body that suffers: an athlete's mind may start playing games with them, too.

Kristy Morrell, a registered sports dietitian who worked with student athletes at the University of Southern California, sees the same issue in her work. Even if it does start from a place of innocence, it can manifest into psychological dread.

“Some of them are like, 'Yeah, I just want to lose a little weight,' Morrell adds. “But then it's almost like psychologically they become somebody that they never thought they would be. Even though they've been playing their sport since maybe five years old, they're almost willing to compromise all of that to be at a thinner weight.”

Losing weight: innocence, image and identity

Sterling and Morrell’s expertise here most closely relates to the Nourse twins’ own experience. COVID-19 unexpectedly cut their freshman beach volleyball season short. Unable to play at home due to the shut down of beaches in Orange County, CA, they started working out more and cooking healthy meals to “get cut” and feel better when they looked in the mirror.

Sure, they were playing some of the best volleyball in their career in the few months they had at USC. But they were also more muscular than ever as it was the first time they lifted weights.

The pandemic, however, allowed them to ramp up the exercise and alter their bodies in a way that did not enhance volleyball performance.

“You start making a habit and then you start changing in action, and then that becomes a habit,” Nicole Nourse says. “And over six months, all of a sudden, literally before we knew it, we had gotten pretty lean. And it was, it was tough.”

Leanness does not equal health, and does not always correlate with strong performance on the court. It is like being in a different kind of shape: a "toned" figure that is sustainable, but not suitable for high-level beach volleyball performance compared to a more "built" body that gives the twins the ability to fiercly jump, dive and block in the sand.

Neither Nicole nor Audrey put a set number on the amount of weight they wanted to lose; however, before they knew it, they were down five, then fifteen pounds. And coming back as sophomore at USC, they were not adequetly prepared or fueled for their sport. "Almost willing to compromise" performance to be at a thinner weight.

For others, the experience is more like a roller coaster ride than a drop tower. Harris, a relatively petite girl throughout adolescence, always heard she would have to “bulk up” once she got to college. She welcomed the challenge to gain muscle in order to help her progress on the course.

She was happy with the strides she made in her athletic performance, riding a high of the rollercoaster ride.

But as the saying goes, what goes up comes down. On a rollercoaster and on the scale.

Seeing her weight on the scale upset her. So, she decided to lose a few pounds— just to "lean out" a bit. It came from a sense of innocence just like the Nourse twins, and resulted in similar consequences.

“I’ve played certain tournaments before in the past where I wasn't getting as many calories as I should have been, and I felt sluggish,” Harris says of her lengthy golf tournaments.

It is a common misconception that all golfers have caddies and take carts around the course. In college, that is not the case. The golfers first play 36 holes, plus another 18 which typically equates to roughly nine hours spent playing or being on one’s feet.

There are sports, too, where that “just lose a little weight” mindset is inherently built into the culture.

“I think the hardest part for our athletes to understand is that it would be naive to not recognize that for some sports, being a little bit leaner can help,” Link says. “Especially in a sport where you're quite literally moving your mass, there is some benefit at some point, to being a little bit leaner, a little bit lighter,” Link says.

Ferrer is a victim of such understanding with gymnastics.

“Early on, I was very open to understanding like, okay, you can't be obese to be a gymnast,” she says. “If you weigh heavier and you're flipping around and landing, it's going to put more pressure on your joints, which causes more injuries.”

Contrary to this belief, Ferrer arrived at LSU her freshman year and put on the dreaded “freshman 15.” Her coaches pulled her aside after her third weigh-in to let her know she not only gained weight, but she gained body fat. And that was not accepted well by either side.

The irony here is Ferrer was doing the “best gymnastics of [her] life.” The number on the scale still trumped any performance in the gym, however. Ferrer did a complete reversal to reshape herself into the stereotypical lean gymnast. It surely would make her more confident in her skin-tight leotard, right?

Has there every been a period where you decreased your calories in an attempt to look a certain way?

A Fine Line

A fine line exists between losing weight and performance on the court, in the gym or on the course.

“We try to educate that losing weight is a bell-shaped curve,” Link adds. “You have to be aware that, yes, [losing weight] can be helpful to an extent. But we get to the top of that bell-shaped curve. And that's where a lot of athletes don't recognize that only to a certain extent does that help and it's not linear. We can't just keep losing weight and expect to keep getting better.”

Athletes innately have a competitive edge to them. It allows them to be fierce in their sport and reach new heights. Yet it is also what can bring them into the “trenches,” as Morrell calls it.

“My concern is always that this is bigger than what they think and harder to let go of when they are in the trenches. The longer you deal with it and live in those trenches, the harder it is to get out,” Kristy Morrell says.

The trenches Morrell refers to are about more than just body and weight— it’s about mental functions as well that can help or hinder athletic performance. And it is no secret that a massive part of golf is such.

“If you don't eat enough, you're going to crash out there,” Harris says. “It's going to have a huge impact on your concentration and your brain is not going to function properly.”

The decrease in physical and mental excellence paves the way to the red flags of underfueling. Known as the Female Athlete Triad, a subset of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), this includes amenorrhea (missing a menstrual cycle), osteoporosis and impaired bone health.

Click the image below for more information on the Female Athlete Triad and RED-S.

The Toughest Opponent

There is a point when food is no longer fuel— it’s as an opponent. An opponent that keeps female collegiate athletes from actually doing what they worked so hard to do in college.

“I had ankle surgery [my sophomore year] summer and that wasn’t even healing,” Ferrer says.

An insufficient amount of calories decreases bone density and increases the pressure on ligaments, joints and tendons to support one’s body. But the body is focused on merely surviving and cannot repair itself to the standard needed to perform at the collegiate level.

“I always give the example of your muscle being the difference between beef jerky and like a raw piece of steak, like how easy it is to tear beef jerky,” Morrell says. “Getting a season ending injury is devastating, especially mentally. But [athletes are] putting themselves at such risk when they're demanding all of these intense trainings from their body and yet under fueling.”

The Nourse twins experienced this symptom first-hand.

“Within six months of each other we had bone bruises on our joints because we were weak and we didn't really have the muscles to support the load that we were bearing when we were blocking,” Nicole Nourse says of her and Audrey. “We didn't have the body fat to cushion us. And we're identical twins. She had the exact MRI that I had like six months after I had.”

“Once you're done building bone in your mid-twenties, you're not building anymore. We see athletes sometimes who are already osteoporotic and that is wildly concerning because they're behind the curve for the rest of their life." Lauren Link

Female collegiate athletes may enter the slippery slope of weight loss for a multitude of reasons, as previously discussed, but a general lack of education regarding the issue is an unfortunate shared reality.

When the Nourse twins dropped an unexpected amount of weight during COVID, cutting out carbohydrates and replacing a bulk of their caloric intake with vegetables promoted the weight loss. When Ferrer came back as a sophomore after summer, her coaches praised her thinner body.

Let’s visit the idea of collegiate athletes as machines. Think of a car. Without gas, a car’s engine will stop. It may be able to trudge along for a couple of reserve miles, but after that the loss of power becomes too great for any function to run properly. When Harris was at a low, she struggled to sustain the sufficient energy to complete a tournament.

The same is true for the human body with all food and macronutrients, but carbohydrates especially. A “low-carb” diet is consistently one of the most popular diet fads. Ironically, it is also one of the most dangerous for young women to follow.

“Across the board, carbohydrates are the one food that they just start restricting,” Morrell finds in her work with female collegiate athletes. “So it's helping them understand how many carbohydrates their body needs– depending on their sport, their height, their weight. It's educating them like, ‘okay, you actually need 12 servings a day of carbohydrates. So what does a serving look like?’”

Link echoes this sentiment, saying that the increase in misinformation surrounding carbohydrates makes it imperative she is able to teach her athletes the value of glycogen and calories from the moment the step on campus as freshman.

“We do a lot of unpacking misinformation that we've all been fed our whole life,” she says. “In the media, a lot of times we hear like 1,200 calories or 1,500 calories a day [for adult women]. That’s not an appropriate amount for an adult woman, let alone an athlete. I try to help them understand that 3,000 calories is probably the absolute lowest I would go. And that can be hard for them to swallow because it's like almost double what they're used to hearing.”

Creating a Sustainble Diet

Part of that pill to swallow comes naturally with age. Sometimes, experience is the best method of learning, as Audrey Nourse knows.

“It took getting to that low point to realize that it's just not worth it to be there,” she says. “It's just been one big learning process. It's a big learning curve.”

Haylin Harris on the golf course, feeling fueled properly after years training at the collegiate level. Photo courtesy of Haylin Harris.

Harris agrees: the lows can be low when intrusive thoughts take control, but the highs are even higher when athletes help themselves reach a point of in understanding how their values on the field align factors off the field.

“There's been periods where I haven't been necessarily happy with how much weight I put on when I'm in season,” Harris says in her fifth and final year as a collegiate athlete. “But I've come to the realization that it's necessary for any athlete. I think a lot of people get insecure about it, but having the realization that you need [calories and weight] to compete in your sport and to be healthy is the biggest thing.”

Certainly, there is still room for improvement to prevent the rapid rates of eating disorders we see today— from the ways society treats the female body, to the ways in which diet culture penetrates everyday discussion.

These advancements are making their way into the athletic world. Though social media as a whole favors a model-like body, Nicole Nourse has a positive outlook on from her experience.

With a diverse algorithm on apps like TikTok tailored uniquely to each user, she finds her “For You Page” highlights stronger over unrealistic body standards.

The Nourse twins celebrating a victory, and feeling strong in their bodies while doing so. Photo courtesy of Nicole Nourse.

“Being strong is beautiful and it's good for you and it’s championed,” she says. “I think that is really cool because then maybe younger girls will avoid some of the situations that we went through, which I wish we did if I could go back.”

Bailey Ferrer celebrating a successful gymnastics meet. Photo courtesy of Bailey Ferrer.

Ferrer agrees, adding that she intends to use her past battles to end the cycle for the next generation of athletes.

“I don't want to just be like, ‘Oh, Bailey Ferrer who had an eating disorder?’ I want to be, ‘Bailey Ferrer who had an eating disorder but is now helping others and is showing them that they can come out of it on the other end.’”

It should not be a burden on athletes who suffered from an eating disorder to feel pressure to stop the cycle. But, change does start from within. And with athletes like Ferrer, Harris and the Nourse twins willing to speak about the dichotomy of food as fuel or fear shows a positive step for future athletes, all while reframeing the way we as a society value female's bodies.