Disordered eating is
common among athletes, and so is the
female athlete triad, which consists of disordered eating, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis.
A blogger at Endocrine Today wondered how to help the girls and young women with this problem. First of all, how do you detect someone with the triad (which, he noted, is ironically abbreviated FAT) if they aren't emaciated? One solution is for coaches to ask directly- though a crochety 60 year old man asking a 15-year-old girl if she needs any Tampax might not yield much in the way of useful answers.
The next question is what do you do if an athlete has developed either of these symptoms?
Says the Endocrine Today blog:
Weight gain to the point where normal menstrual function is restored appears to be the only well-documented successful remedy, but that is a hard message to get across. It may be helpful to remind the patient that Michael Phelps won eight gold medals on a daily calorie intake widely reported in our local newspapers to be 10,000 calories a day... A young cross country runner put it more succinctly in a
New York Times article on varsity athletics and eating disorders:
In high school, Emily Brown, 22, lost her period for six months. But lately Ms. Brown, who has increased her mileage as a member of the cross-country team at the University of Minnesota, menstruates normally. How? She eats more. Proper nutrition should be as much of a part of athletic training as sprinting and stretching.
A blogger at Endocrine Today wondered how to help the girls and young women with this problem. First of all, how do you detect someone with the triad (which, he noted, is ironically abbreviated FAT) if they aren't emaciated? One solution is for coaches to ask directly- though a crochety 60 year old man asking a 15-year-old girl if she needs any Tampax might not yield much in the way of useful answers.
The next question is what do you do if an athlete has developed either of these symptoms? Says the Endocrine Today blog:
Weight gain to the point where normal menstrual function is restored appears to be the only well-documented successful remedy, but that is a hard message to get across. It may be helpful to remind the patient that Michael Phelps won eight gold medals on a daily calorie intake widely reported in our local newspapers to be 10,000 calories a day...
A young cross country runner put it more succinctly in a New York Times article on varsity athletics and eating disorders:
In high school, Emily Brown, 22, lost her period for six months. But lately Ms. Brown, who has increased her mileage as a member of the cross-country team at the University of Minnesota, menstruates normally. How? She eats more.
Proper nutrition should be as much of a part of athletic training as sprinting and stretching.