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Overtraining and
Undereating
Part 2: A Deadly Need to be Perfect
As with many anorexics, Clawson focused only
on seeing lower numbers on the scale. Her treatment began
when her doctor noticed her dangerously low weight and her
mother intervened, sending her to a nutritionist and a therapist.
"The nurse weighed me and the scale said 109 pounds. I
didn’t think that was a problem," she recalled. "I went
back a week or so later and the scale said 103. ‘Yay!’ I
thought."
At her thinnest point, a concerned government teacher at
school took it upon herself to force-feed Clawson. "She
tried to desensitize me to food in ways that would horrify
most counselors and anorexics. She’d lock me in a room until
I ate an apple, but that wasn’t so traumatic. The things
that scared me were the chocolates, the peanut butter cups,
and the cake," she recalled. "I’m grateful now, though.
She made a huge difference to me."
Now a college freshman, Clawson still suffers from the
effects of her anorexia. "The disorder affected my performance
last spring. I was weak and had problems with endurance,"
she said. "It’s not easy to eat, especially foods that are
new to me, but I’m getting better. I hope to recover completely
someday."
An 18-year-old runner in Florida, who developed anorexia
at 12 years old, said that her disorder began because of
her desire to be "perfect."
"I wanted to be perfect for the coaches, I wanted to be
No. 1, and I wanted to show the world I had control," said
the runner, who restricted her calorie intake to 900 calories
and ran four miles a day. She then accustomed herself to
200 calories and six miles a day. At 5 feet 5 inches, she
weighed a startling 61 pounds.
"[My parents] didn’t notice until I was about 80 pounds,"
she said. "I passed out in front of them and they called
911." She spent the following four months in the hospital,
where her only nourishment came from a tube. Now at 98 pounds,
she, like other anorexics in recovery, struggles with eating
three meals a day.
"I’m still worried about my weight, but I know that being
thin is not what matters in life," she added. "You don’t
need to be thin to win."
Recovery is a slow process, with the athlete sometimes
reverting to the "restrictive" behavior and sustaining a
low body weight.
"I don’t fear that my anorexia will return because it never
really disappeared," said Vanessa Holtzberg, a 17-year-old
lacrosse and field hockey player from Rochester, N.Y. Holtzberg
developed anorexia a year and a half ago. "I always restrict
when I am sad and sometimes I even purge if I feel I ate
too much," she said.
Like Clawson, Holtzberg believes her anorexia developed
out of a need to "please everyone," not a pressure to perform
athletically.
"My lacrosse coach kept asking me at pre-season workouts
if I was eating," she said. "When I had to tell my coach
I couldn’t play lacrosse, she looked at me and said ‘I know,
I’m not blind, I know what’s going on.’"
Others noticed her declining health. "One of my teachers
told me she thought she could see my bones through my clothes,"
she recalled. A worried friend cried as he hugged her and
felt her emaciated body.
Holtzberg developed alarming eating habits and tricks to
disguise her deteriorating weight. "I starved myself for
three weeks, living off two chewable vitamins a day," she
admitted. At her lowest point, the 5 foot 8 athlete’s weight
dropped to 95 pounds.
Concerned teachers and coaches had her weighed weekly at
school, but she found a way around that. "The nurse weighed
me with my clothes on, so I would stick weights in my pockets,"
she recalled, all in an effort to deny her suffering. "Even
when I was in the hospital, I maintained my innocence,"
she said. "When I started to say that I was anorexic at
a group, I didn’t believe it. When I finally looked in the
mirror and saw what a distorted self-image really looked
like, I realized that something was wrong."
Andrew Price, an athletic trainer at New York University’s
Coles Athletic Center, said it is difficult to determine
if an athlete is suffering from an eating disorder. "The
majority of the time, the athlete won’t come to us with
the eating disorder as their chief complaint. Sometimes,
through the questions that we ask, they clue us in," he
said. "We have to play detective sometimes."
According to Price, NYU athletes are not regularly weighed.
"We do it at the beginning of the year, for a pre-participation
physical, and then that’s it," he said. "We don’t weigh
them weekly, or anything like that."
NEXT:
Understanding eating disorders in athletes>>
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