The way I used to talk about my body is absurd to me now.  I’m a healthy person; I try my best to get some sort of exercise every day, and I limit my French fry and Oreo intake.  I nourish my body with foods that I enjoy and that contribute to my health.  I try not to talk negatively about my body (or other people’s bodies), and I keep in mind that a body is just a body; it changes all the time and it gets me where I need to go. 

            My frame of mind now is worlds away from where it was in my early teen years.  I remember saying “I wish I was strong enough to have an eating disorder, but I just like food too much!” those words came out of my mouth.  I feel shame and disgust as I recount that, but I try to remember that my friends around me nodded their heads in agreement and often made similar comments.  Our culture encouraged starving yourself.  Many of my friends almost bragged about how little calories they took in, and we all lamented when we ate something bad for us like cake or fried food.  We were kids.  We were working out 4 or more hours through the day, easily.  Twice that in the summer.

            Despite our obsessions with food, none of us really ate healthy.  We lived off of Chick-Fil-A and peanut butter sandwiches.  Occasionally a coach would encourage us to give up carbs, which we would follow through with for a short while.  We had no idea what was healthy or how much we needed to eat to take care of our tired, growing bodies.  We just knew that “skinny” meant hard-working, beautiful, and healthy and “fat” (anything over a size 4) meant lazy and ugly.  Being fat was one of the worst things someone could be.

I came from a sport where image was huge.  We spent thousands of dollars on costumes.  The prettier, smaller girls were more likely to win—they just were.  I had classes on how to put on makeup, an area which I never really excelled.  I don’t want to blame all of this on aesthetic sports; much of what I experienced is a normal experience for any girl in our culture, athlete or not.  Beauty is vital to being a woman in western culture, or so it seems.  There’s only so much we can do to make ourselves more attractive, especially on a limited budget, but we can do a lot to make ourselves thin.

            Common sense would tell us that athletes know how to nourish their bodies, but my experience tells me that’s not true.  In sports like wrestling, men often have to rapidly gain or lose weight in an attempt to change their competitive category.  In football, men try to “bulk up” by consuming tons of calories from any sort of food.  Athletes in a variety of sports do what they can to attain whatever shape they’re going for without much regard for nutrition.  Their respective cultures tell them that’s what they should do.  Coaches tell them that’s what they should do, because that’s what the coaches did when they were competing.

            Despite American culture moving more toward a health-conscious attitude, athletes are often so ingrained in their sub-culture that it doesn’t matter.  The general population is “fat” so it doesn’t matter what they think or do.  In order to change the culture in sports, you have to be a part of it.  By working with athletes, I hope I can help shift these stringent ideas around body types.  An athletic body deserves nutrients.  It deserves lots of calories to replace all that it’s losing with exercise.  I’m not a nutritionist and I won’t give advice on how or what to eat, but I do know that we all need food.  Starvation is not a strength.  Thriving despite unhealthy ideas around body image is a strength.