Are Sports Responsible for Girls' Eating Disorders?

When gymnast Nastia Liukin earned the all-around gold August 15 in Beijing's National Indoor Stadium, she joined legends such as Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton as an idol who will inspire future generations of young girls to nurture their own Olympic dreams.
But for some girls, Liukin's success may be seen as motivation to starve themselves.

In a Feb. 2, 2006 USA Today article, writer Nanci Hellmich noted that anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders are among a wide range of health problems faced by young female athletes.

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.

In the 2002 study of 425 female college athletes, 43% said they were terrified of being or becoming too heavy, and 55% reported experiencing pressure to achieve or maintain a certain weight. Most said the pressure was self-imposed, but many also felt pressure from coaches and teammates. ...

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.

At least one athlete who once struggled with an eating disorder echoes the assertion that the problem is particularly prevalent among girls who compete in sports in which appearance is emphasized.

"It would be hard to find a female athlete in the aesthetic sports - gymnastics, diving, cheerleading, figure skating, dancing - who isn't preoccupied with body image and somewhat obsessive about what she is eating," former Olympic diver Kimiko Hirai Soldati, herself a recovering bulimic, told Helmich.