Breaking a sweat and sterotypes

Hey everyone, welcome to my podcast, Breaking the Silhouette and Stereotypes. I'm Tessa Lord and I figured that today we could talk about something that is super important to me and should be important to everyone because of how big of a problem this is. I feel like this is something that people don't really talk about because they figure it's a touchy subject or that it shouldn't be brought up, but if we don't bring it up then nothing's ever going to change, right? So what I'm talking about is our athletic world and how it affects our body image in our female athletes. We all know a girl who's either doing some sport right now or has in the past, whether this is just someone random, one of our close friends, family members, or even yourself. And with so many people in our lives being involved in sports, I think that this should be more addressed because 68% of all female athletes have reported to be unsatisfied with their bodies and struggled with body image throughout their athletic journey. 68%! That's insane. And I don't know what's scarier, this statistic or the fact that I was even the least bit surprised by it. I'm speaking as someone who's done dance their whole life and I've seen a lot of my teammates struggle with this and go through this type of thing and it was kind of never just for them either. And so seeing a lot of people that I was close to go through these struggles, it got me really curious as to why this struggle with body image is so common in female athletes and what we can do to try to fix it. The main thing that I found was that the stress that accompanies being a female athlete and expectations that go along with it is what causes this problem to occur. Although many people think that this pressure of protection is what makes our high achieving athletes so great, we shouldn't create this unrealistic body standard for them because it is so detrimental to how body image is viewed. An article was written by Mohammed Khan as he looked at different athletes and their personal experiences with body image and in his studies and research he concluded that in women's sports particularly, unrealistic and irrelevant patriarchal standards are often imposed and this all impacts how women in sports see themselves, how they're presented and the expectations that young female athletes then have for their image and their bodies. All of these women have entered into an environment where there's more drive for success with their bodies and more judgment for when it's not achieved and while they should be striving to be the best they can, it should also be more known and accepted that there isn't just one body type in order to be successful. Body image is how one views themselves and their physical characteristics and that can often become a very messy subject once the training of their bodies to prevail their sports becomes more pushed. A large part of why it's so much greater for these female athletes is because of media. There's a lot of extra attention on them and their body which causes them to be more self-aware of how they're perceived by others and others opinions on them and our society has always had social beauty standards that the population just kind of agrees on this. This is beautiful in our culture and it's kind of tall, pale, skinny, curvy in our culture today and with all of the expectations that are put on these female athletes as well as having to fit into their own sports culture and standards, they also have to deal with the social beauty standards which each sport has a different stereotypical body figure that you think that you have to fit into to also prevail at that sport and this begins at the very beginning of the sporting journey and just increases from there. Researchers studied current and past athletes ranging from ages 8 to 18 in an article that they wrote the effects of body image, social media, and gender roles on sports attrition and they found that many teenagers were quitting because they didn't think they had the right look for that sport based on media images and those who continue participating in athletics especially in a more competitive zone also begin to have more training to result in better performance. You have to be eating well and building muscle in order to help you prevail in your majority of sports and these practices often make it harder to fit into both standards. For example, being muscular doesn't really coincide with being skinny so this can create a source of stress directly from their bodies not being able to fit into the expectations our society has for these female athletes. They can't fit into this stereotypical social beauty standard as well as their sports culture beauty standard and this is where our problem starts to occur is because they don't fit into these standards that we as a society create. They have this own stress and they feel like they're not enough and this creates a problem and will affect them and their performance. All of this stress causes athletes to have a negative self-body image and it impacts their physical health as well as their mental health. Megan Marshall is a former competitive runner who has shared her story and her experience with this conflict and she talks about how she's always ran and for her she never really experienced any of these pressures and expectations until she ran in college and she started seeing all of these being applied to her and her teammates and began to wonder why did I have to look a certain way to run fast? Why did only the fastest, leanest, strongest, and fittest get praised? And she continues to share her story of how these ideals and standards pushed her into having an eating disorder and struggling with anxiety and depression and she felt like there was nowhere to turn or get help from it because that's just what came from being a female athlete and so now she shares her story and lets others know that this isn't how training and athletics should be run and Megan's only one of the many who have gone through this exact same thing. The largest risk that comes from having a negative body image is the development of having an eating disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health has listed infertility, heart damage, brain damage, and organ failure as the main side effects that having an eating disorder caused and a writer called Christina Yu wrote an article called We Need to Talk About Female Athletes and in it she talks about the research that she's gathered in her studies and if bodies aren't given enough to eat they're weaker and bones will break 4.5 times more likely than normal which is a big deal for these female athletes that are constantly competing and training and have that strain on their bodies and an even more shocking research that she found was that 45% of female athletes have admitted to having an eating disorder before in their past or currently. That's almost half and if this is such a large problem, horrible outcomes, and it's affecting so many people then why aren't we trying to change it? I mean we can't just say oh well that's what you signed up for. We need to start changing the atmosphere to a more body positive environment for our female athletes. Obviously this isn't just so one thing will fix all problem type of situation but there are so many different steps to helping. There are basically two different sides to the problem. Helping those that are already struggling with this and then preventing the problem in the first place. So for helping people who are already struggling with this I think there should be nutrition programs that are set up to help people feel like there's somewhere that they can turn to once they start struggling with this and becoming overwhelmed. And then to help prevent the problem in the first place I think that coaches and trainers should be able to have this as part of their certification on how to deal with this and how to interact with the athletes in a more positive way. And you can kind of set up either if it's just you guys or if it's a team and have just kind of that place that's a refuge from all of these different kind of standards and stereotypes. And then we need to target younger generations before they have more of this impact on them and make sure that they are introduced into this athletic world as a positive place. And then as we change what we put out there I think that we'll be able to change the atmosphere and make it better for all of our female athletes in the long run. So let's get to it guys. Thanks for listening.