From Harm to Hope: Guest Post by David Stansbury

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David Stansbury is an undergraduate student at Anderson University in Indiana where he is pursuing a major in exercise science and minors in psychology and nutrition. David is on the cross country and track and field teams. When he’s not running, he loves getting coffee and reading books that are about running or working on the mental side of sports, or spending time with his girlfriend. He loves being around his friends playing cards or board games. David’s main goal in life is to use the resources and passions that he has to help people get better in all aspects of their life. 

Note: Eating disorder behaviors mentioned. Events and conversations have been recreated from David’s memories of them.

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During my freshman year of college, I believed that food needed to be earned. I “earned” food by how hard I worked, and I alone determined when I deserved it. This came from a constant negative body image that I had developed from the comparison between myself and the athletes that were around me, and from years of being made fun of for my body. 

The days I felt that I deserved food, I would eat and feel content with myself and my body. But on days when I felt that I didn’t deserve it, I told myself that I didn’t get to eat, or that food that I did eat, I didn’t get to keep. 

These thoughts intensified when I looked at my performance in running. When I ran well, I attributed it to the weight that I had lost and the body that I currently had. But when I ran poorly, I would tell myself that I was too big or that I didn’t have the body that a true runner “should” have.

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“You Can Never Have An Eating Disorder That Isn’t ‘Serious Enough'”

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Charmaine is an undergraduate at the University of Bristol reading International Social and Public Policy. When she’s not running, you can probably find her in climbing gyms, the mountains or some corner of Bristol. If she’s not outdoors, she’s probably cooped up with a book about the human condition, a social issue or someone’s adventure. All things aside, she believes in sharing and connection. We are all walking libraries, connected by the power of stories for the empathy and understanding that they can foster.  

NOTE: Eating disorder behaviors mentioned.

2017: An Innocent Diet Journey

For the bulk of my teenage years, I struggled with disordered eating. I was a competitive athlete in Triple Jump, and failed to perform during the 2017 season. That prompted me to go on a weight loss journey, with the innocent desire to improve my performance. I thought that if I weighed less, I could ‘jump further.’ 

I started off by eliminating certain food from my diet and tracked every food item I consumed. Knowing cardiovascular activity was known to help with weight loss, I started running. As the numbers decreased on the scale, I became more motivated. I decreased my calorie limit every week while increasing my weekly mileage. 

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A Letter to Younger Me (Guest Post)

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This post was submitted by a runner who would like to remain anonymous. Her letter speaks not only to a younger version of herself, but perhaps also to others who are going through similar circumstances with disordered eating and injuries.

Dear Younger Me,

I know right now you are thinking, does it get better? You feel lost, stuck in a world of black and white, while everyone around you seems to be living in full color. 

Everyone tells you that you’re at your prime. You’re a young, 19-year-old, Division I athlete, the dream for many. But I know to you that means nothing. You’ve spent so much time sidelined by injury instead of actually competing that you don’t feel you deserve the title anyway. You usually act as if you aren’t on the team out of fear of embarrassing your teammates — the ones who actually represent the school while you’re stuck at home.  

I know you often wonder, how did I end up here? What did I do wrong? I did all of this so that I could run, and now it has disintegrated in my own hands. While this isn’t an easy pill to swallow, you have a long road ahead of you full of twists and turns.  

The thing is, you never give up. Ten years later, and that hasn’t changed. Some call it stubbornness. I say it’s perseverance. Bear with me. It will get better. But it is a journey. 

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Creating Community: Recovery is Better Together (Guest Post by Sarah DeGraff)

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Sarah DeGraff is a Grand Rapids, Michigan native running the Afton 50K Trail Race this Saturday, June 2. She decided to run this race and raise funds for Running in Silence to support bringing eating disorder awareness to more athletes and coaches around the country. Every $1,000 donated helps us reach another group of athletes and/or coaches. You can donate here!

Sarah holds a BA in International Development. She is currently earning her Master’s in Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is researching organic vegetable variety trials. Previously, she has worked as an Agricultural Extension Educator with UW-Madison Division of Extension. She enjoys running on the Ice Age Trail and Kettle Moraine trails nearby, as well as gardening, backpacking, hiking, traveling, and biking.

I ran my first marathon at age 27. “Limped through” is probably a more accurate description. Thanks to IT band issues I had throughout training, I wound up walking the final three miles into the finish chute. I immediately signed up for another race, despite my coworkers laughing at me as I hobbled around the office for the following week.

I had fallen in love with the training process of endurance sport.

I am not a traditional athlete. I didn’t join a track or cross-country team in high school or college. Training competitively started about five years ago, when I joined a marathon training team organized by a local running store. When my pace improved, I signed up for as many road races as I could.

Two years later, I moved away from friends and family to work on an organic farm in northern Wisconsin and began to train for my first ultramarathon trail race on my own, away from friends and family. I stayed busy working forty hours a week on the farm plus ten hours of training. The improvements I saw in my running performances added to the excitement. I felt a strong emotional connection to running, identified myself as a runner, and started to win age group awards and place in races.

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5 Things Coaches Should Avoid Saying to Adolescent Athletes

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By: Amanda Feldman 

Amanda Feldman is a graduate student in Boston University’s Nutrition and Dietetics program pursuing her RDN credential with a special interest in sports nutrition and eating disorders. Outside of the classroom, she is a high school Varsity Softball and Cross Country coach at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, MA, where she graduated before continuing on to play 2 years of collegiate softball at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. In her free time, Amanda is an avid long-distance runner and is passionate about sharing her love for running, athletics, and nutrition education.

Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that come in all shapes and sizes.1 Male-identifying and female-identifying. Those in larger and smaller bodies. They can occur in runners, football players, soccer players, dancers, fencers and everything in between.

As a former athlete and a current high school coach myself, I am aware of the unique role coaches play in an adolescent athlete’s life. We act as role models, mentors, and individuals our athletes are trying to impress. In some cases, the internal pressure to impress a coach is so high our athletes will do anything and everything asked of them to get on the field, be a starter, become a captain, or earn a coach’s respect. Because of this, everything from the way coaches talk about goal setting, fueling and food, athletes’ bodies, and body changes can have a profound impact on an athlete – be that positive or negative.

Some individuals have a predisposition that puts them at a higher risk for developing an eating disorder. Eating disorders are “complex traits,” and multiple environmental and genetic factors play a role in their development.1 This includes individual’s genetics, past experiences, societal pressures, traumas, and other mental health diagnoses to name a few factors. It is hard for us to identify exactly who is at high risk for developing one, but what we do know is that adolescence is a vulnerable period,2 one in which eating disorders too commonly manifest. This is why we need to place high importance on eating disorder prevention.

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Kamila Valieva’s Tragedy is Not An Isolated Incident

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Guest Post By Matt Stranberg

Matt Stranberg, MS RDN LDN CSSD CSCS is a Sports Nutrition and Exercise Science Specialist helping athletes and non-athletes improve their relationship to food and exercise. To learn more visit: https://www.mattstranbergconsulting.com/ Follow Matt on instagram: @matt_stranberg_consulting

Olympic trials have always had their fair share of controversies and dramas, dating back to the early 1900’s and the spectacle of Nazi Berlin to more recent media frenzies surrounding Simone Biles’s 2021 withdrawal. This year is no different as young Russian figure skating prodigy, Kamila Valieva was plunged into scandal following a positive drug test as well as more recent stories highlighting her series of falls in competition resulting in a media explosion exploring the cruel treatment by coaches during her heartbreaking moments of public anguish.

Many critics, including International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach have derided Kamila’s treatment as “disturbing, cold, harsh and chilling to see.”[i] Numerous media outlets have framed this tragedy as yet another “confrontation between Russia and international institutions,”[ii] that has reignited debates regarding possible age limits for Olympic competition.[iii]

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What I Learned as a Collegiate Runner Majoring in Dietetics (Guest Post by Maggie Farrell) Part 3

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Read Part 1 of Maggie’s Journey here.

Read Part 2 of Maggie’s Journey here.

Donate to her Running in Silence marathon journey fundraiser here! Maggie will be running the Austin Marathon THIS Sunday representing Running in Silence.

Since I wrote my initial blog post for Running in Silence, I have had several people ask me, “Why did you wait until now to share your struggles?” To be honest, I was scared–scared of what admitting I had a problem would mean for my running career. Scared that asking for help made me weak and people would question if I had actually had a problem.

It took stepping away from competitive running to realize that asking for help didn’t make me weak. My perspective mattered.

I shared in my first post that the first time I ever worried about my weight wasn’t until my junior year of high school. However, upon reflection, I realized that this isn’t entirely the truth. I remember stepping on the scale as a fourth grader. When I looked down at the scale, I remember feeling dissatisfied with the number and making myself get out the door for a walk. That night for dinner, I cut back on the number of bread and butter slices (a staple in my diet at that time) because I had been told that bread was “bad.”  Fourth grade.That is absurd.

I bring up this experience to illustrate how difficult it is to have a healthy relationship with food and our bodies today. We are told, explicitly or implicitly, at a very young age, that our weight is one of the most important things about us. I won’t go too much into how our diet culture is harming our relationship with food at the very first exposure because we could be here for a while. I do, however, want to point out that this exposure to diet culture, in combination with additional pressures to “stay fit” and look a certain way in competitive sports, can make someone’s susceptibility to developing an eating disorder incredibly high.

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What I learned as a Collegiate Runner Majoring in Dietetics (Guest Post by Maggie Farrell) Part II

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Read Part 1 of Maggie’s Journey here.

Donate to her Running in Silence marathon journey fundraiser here!

My eating disorder and running goals had me focusing on one common thing: how to be less. How I could spend less time on the cross-country course or track? Eat less throughout the day? Weigh less on the scale? And take up less space in this world? These thoughts of how to be less took up most of the space in my brain. It seemed the better I got at running, the more mental space was taken up by these goals.

This hyper-focused mindset, in addition to the irritability that came with under-fueling, made it difficult for me to form meaningful relationships and spend time with the ones I loved.

Looking back at the time I was struggling the most with my eating disorder, I can now identify several ways my social life and relationships were impacted:

  1. I went to bed early due to a fear of eating too much or “giving in” to my cravings. At this point in my life, it was a miracle to find me out of bed past 8 p.m. I was afraid the later I stayed up, the less willpower I had, and the more likely I would eat more food. Plus, thanks to the lack of energy I was consuming at the time, I just didn’t have the energy to stay up late.
  2. I turned down offers to go to social gatherings where food was involved. I would do just about anything to avoid my “fear foods.” These are foods that people avoid due to negative thoughts about the healthfulness of the food. I avoided foods that were commonly deemed by society as “bad” since I thought they would make me run slow or gain weight. I would do just about anything to avoid these foods.
  3. My thoughts were always dedicated to food. Like I said earlier, most of my thoughts at this point in my life were dedicated to food and my diet. How could I cut a couple of extra calories from my diet? What would I allow myself to eat the next day? Is the dressing that they served with my salad “healthy?” How many more calories should I eat today? This obsession with food was exhausting, but I couldn’t control my thoughts, so I just tried to ignore them. Little did I know that this was my body’s cry for help. I was starving.
  4. I didn’t have much energy for social events, and I was easily irritable. As I mentioned in my previous post, constant under-fueling translated into me feeling irritated a good proportion of the time. In addition, I was restricting my caloric intake, which meant I didn’t have the energy to do much else other than run.

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What I Learned as a Collegiate Runner Majoring in Dietetics (Guest Post by Maggie Farrell) Part 1

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Last year, Maggie Farrell reached out to me with a request to raise awareness for eating disorders in sports through Running in Silence in an upcoming marathon. As a Michigan high school cross country and track coach, I had the opportunity to witness some of Maggie’s running accomplishments in high school. But the greatest privilege has been watching her work on this three-part piece that reveals the gritty woman Maggie aspired to be from a young age, who now inspires others.

Maggie Farrell, 2016 high school state cross country and 2017 3200m high school state track champion for Michigan, graduated in 2021 from Michigan State University with her BS in Dietetics. In addition to her studies, Maggie competed on the MSU Cross Country and Track & Field team. Throughout her time competing at MSU, she was Big 10 Freshman Runner of the Year, first-team All-Big 10, and competed in the NCAA Cross Country Championship. Maggie also helped the MSU women’s team win the Big Ten’s conference championship in 2020. Maggie is currently a graduate student at Texas State University where she is completing her dietetic internship and MS in Human Nutrition to become a registered dietitian.

This past fall, I was inspired by my dad to run the Austin Marathon in February 2022. Throughout my time training for this marathon, I will be raising money for Running in Silence, an organization that encourages the athletic community to talk about the prevalence of eating disorders, help athletes seek out the help they need, and assist coaches with eating disorder awareness and prevention. I encourage you to consider donating to this amazing organization so we can help raise awareness about eating disorders in sports and help lessen the struggle for athletes.

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Why We Need to Talk About Male* Eating Disorders (Guest Post by Molly Fennig)

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*Individuals who identify as male

As an athlete who had trouble recognizing her eating disorder, I (Rachael Steil) can only imagine how tough it can be for men who struggle with eating disorders to identify what they’re going through and get the help they deserve. Molly Fennig, author of Starvation (a novel about a guy struggling with an eating disorder), shares more about male eating disorder misconceptions here.

1. They’re more prevalent than you think.

Depending on the study, up to 40% of individuals with eating disorders are male.

In fact, up to 19% of male athletes have an eating disorder (Bratland-Sanda & Sundgot-Borgen, 2012). Unsurprisingly, sports that promote leanness, either through weight classes (ie wrestling) or increased efficiency (ie distance running) have higher rates of eating disorders.

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