The Body Conversation

The culture has a lot to say about your body.

What it should look like. What size it should be. How it compares to what is considered ideal in your sport. And for female athletes specifically, those messages come from multiple directions at once — the athletic performance standards that value a certain kind of body for competitive reasons and the cultural beauty standards that value something else entirely, often simultaneously.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Fearfully and wonderfully made. This is not a consolation prize for athletes who don’t match the cultural ideal. It is a statement about the nature of the human body as a created thing — that the body you are in was made with care, with intention, with a specificity that deserves the word wonderful.

Female athletes navigate body image pressure in a way that has measurable effects on performance, health, and longevity in the sport. The research on disordered eating in female athletes is significant. The pressure to maintain a certain appearance while also performing at a high physical level creates a genuine tension that is not resolved by simply saying the right words about body positivity.

What helps is a different relationship with the body altogether — one that asks not what does it look like but what can it do. The body that runs fast, jumps high, competes hard, recovers well, does it again tomorrow — that body is a remarkable thing regardless of whether it matches any external standard. The athlete who has a functional relationship with her body — who feeds it and trains it and rests it as an instrument of excellence rather than an object to be sculpted into the right shape — performs better and sustains the performance longer.

Your body is not your enemy. It is the thing you compete in. Treat it as something worth caring for because of what it can do.

This question often produces significant self-awareness. The gap between how athletes talk to themselves vs. how they’d talk to a teammate is usually large. Hold whatever surfaces with care. If any disclosure about disordered eating or eating-related behavior arises, follow up with appropriate professional resources.