Loving Your Body & Loving Others

 "Love your body." "Be proud of your body." "Be comfortable with your body." "Show your body." These are the messages that are circulated through our society, especially toward women athletes. Should you love your body? Yes, and this should motivate you to take care of it. Should you be proud of your body? Yes, in the sense that you are grateful for what it can do. Should you be comfortable with your body? Yes, you should never be ashamed of your body. Should you show your body? (I am specifically asking this question in the realm of women's running.) I know that I am about to tread on rocky ground. I know that there will be disagreement over the topic I am addressing, and that is fine. I am not necessarily seeking to change anyone's mind. I am merely sharing my own answer to the final question I posed. 

Before I share my answer, I will provide some background that has influenced me to draw the conclusion I have come to. I started running when I was fourteen. At this same time, I also began to become conscious of my body. I worried that I was not skinny enough and compared myself to other girls at school. For the next four years these two things, running and body image, would be intricately intertwined, fueling a struggle with food, weight, and body image. When I was fourteen, I started skipping breakfast. At fifteen I started a cycle of binge eating and depriving. By sixteen I was becoming pickier about eating healthy foods. My eating became so controlled that I began to get sick on processed sugars. Seventeen brought a new level of controlled eating and obsessive exercising. I began counting Calories especially after injuring my leg in the summer while training for soccer. Just before my eighteenth birthday, I cut my daily Calorie count to 1,500, while still staying fairly active and recovering from my sport's injury. I was becoming extremely thin, but I never felt like I was thin enough. I compared my body to how I thought I should look, and it was always "lacking." Finally, before crossing the line from being borderline anorexic to being fully anorexic, I received help. 

Okay, so I struggled with an eating disorder when I was a teenager, how does this relate back to whether we as women athletes should cover our bodies? Well, first of all, anorexia is not merely an eating disorder. It is also a mental health disorder. It is a distortion of your relationship with food and your perceived body image. It causes you to believe things that are not true about yourself. For another, the struggle with an eating disorder never goes away. As I told a nutritionist, "The eating disorder never goes away. You just learn to manage it better." She agreed. I merely manage my struggle better than I did when I was a teen, but the damage to my body and mind had been done and the lies of anorexia had been imprinted in my mind. 

These imprinted lies and tendencies can quickly become unmanageable if given the right circumstances. Like a harmful bacteria's ability to flourish if given the right environment, the idea of "show your body" has, I believe, created an ideal environment for anorexia to thrive, especially among women runners. As mentioned previously my struggle with mild anorexia coincided with my start in competitive running. I am in no way blaming my choice to start running. (I will explain in a later blog post how running helps me control my struggle with an eating disorder.) Instead, I wish to draw attention to how women's running clothes can affect other women runner's perception of themselves and their bodies. As a competitive ultramarathon runner, I naturally follow professional runners on Instagram. It is nice to hear their training ideas, successful stories, and, even, unsuccessful stories. Lately, though, I have found myself paying less attention to their stories and more attention to their bodies in comparison to my own. Do my abs look like theirs? Should I do more core work? Am I trim enough to race well this season? Maybe I should lose weight? As I gear up to start the 2023 season, I am naturally paying attention to my food and body. Not in the way I should, though. Rather than focusing on fueling well and doing workouts that will prepare me for the trails, I have caught myself wondering if I have done enough exercise to warrant my eating of certain foods and fixating on whether my body looks like another runner's. I am quite sure that I am not the only woman runner who struggles with this. 

So, I have finally reached the answer to the final question I posed: Should you show your body? I realize that there will be disagreement and each person must come to their own conclusion. As an athlete I have chosen to answer no. No, I will not show my body. This stems from my own experience of still struggling with anorexic tendences sixteen years after it all started. Perhaps another woman who struggles with an eating disorder and body image may have no problem with seeing other athlete's bodies. But for those who are like me, I choose to always cover my body in the hopes that I will not cause them to compare and regress to the very place we are all desperate to escape from.