[abarro81]

Aren't we and the film conflating two different things here? Eating disorders as mental illness/ body dysmorphia etc. and someone dieting as one of a range of obsessive behaviours as a result of being obsessive about a sport.

No, I don't think so. The point I think people are making is about how easy it is for one to lead to the other.

I  may be wrong, but I'd say we are somewhat conflating them at times (especially early on in the thread but less so now).. but like I said earlier, I think it's hard to neatly separate "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different in some ways and yet have huge overlaps in others... At what point does misguided dedication to something become a disorder? When you can't stop? Or when looking back you realised it wasn't good for you but you were in control at the time? I'd guess more people in climbing would be falling into the latter (i.e. screwing up) than the can't-stop (i.e. full-blown ED)?



As a point of order:

One day (when the scale was reading 72kg), I accidentally dropped it and smashed the glass. I went out and bought a new scale, set it all up and then weighed myself to make sure it was all working. The dial read 79kg - my old scale was evidently already broken. I was absolutely devastated because I'd put myself through all this restriction, low energy and generally feeling rubbish for nothing - my weight hadn't changed one bit.

This story as told relies on the original scale going out of calibration over the course of the dieting, but it's also possible that you had lost the weight and the original set of scales was always ~10% underreading.

The main thrust I guess tells us that dieting doesn't work for everyone, even in the short-term. My experience has always been the total opposite - my best ever year corresponded with being so light that I was convinced the scales I was on were underreading until I stood on some other ones a while later. It's possible that I wasn't healthy at that point, but here's the real fucker, which I feel slightly reluctant to post online, would I have done 2016/2017 any differently if you'd told me it wasn't good for my longer term health or climbing? I really don't know*..

[If the last part is too off-message or controversial to be considered ok in this thread then I'm ok for mods to edit it out]
*partly driven by the context of the Aus stuff now possibly being banned forever
**I don't have any particular reason to think it has been bad for my longer-term health, although I do have  LOT of injuries issues nowadays, which may or may not be related

[NaoB]

No, I don't think so. The point I think people are making is about how easy it is for one to lead to the other.

Difficult to argue for, or especially, against this position  but I’m not really seeing anything on this thread or in the film (or elsewhere) to back it up. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen and I certainly don’t want to diminish anyone’s experiences so I’ll leave the debate here.

Well maybe this is actually one of those debates that might sound different with more female input... Anyone can suffer from ED's, but it is more prevalent amongst women. You could see this demonstrated in the film, that Angie struggled with seeing Emily climbing so well whilst being so thin. Whether this was purely concern for her friend or also partly jealousy is not thoroughly explained. However, girls often look at other girls in a comparative way. I don't personally suffer from an ED, but I know the feeling of wishing I had someone else's body, especially if they are climbing hard with no body fat. Instagram does not help with this!!

I agree with what Stu said about weight loss being a tool for top performance and that it would be easy to fall into the trap of trying to sustain this. I have experienced this in the past, and wondered why my form went so downhill. But if I was also more concerned with looking skinny, not just climbing well, then it would have been exponentially harder to break that cycle. Dangerous situation indeed for those susceptible to this type of thinking.

[IanP]

Difficult to argue for, or especially, against this position  but I’m not really seeing anything on this thread or in the film (or elsewhere) to back it up. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen and I certainly don’t want to diminish anyone’s experiences so I’ll leave the debate here.

Think there's been some more positive and interesting stuff posted and I would like to contribute, particularly about how the community deals with young climbers/coaching etc.

However felt should answer this first - I can only feel that you must have projecting some of your own biases on to this film.  Maybe I was projecting my only biases from the other direction, but a quick google will get you some more information about Angie Payne experiences:

https://www.outsideonline.com/2191906/eating-disorders-are-more-common-you-think

'In her mid-teens, she started thinking about eating healthier—not so much because she wanted to lose weight, but because it made her feel like she was getting serious about climbing, pushing her Midwestern adolescent life in the direction of her lofty athletic dreams'

'After graduating from high school, Payne moved to Boulder, Colorado, enrolled in college to appease her parents, and devoted herself to competitive climbing.  On her own for the first time, she was lonely and depressed—feelings she channeled into not only her training but also an increasingly rigid diet. The list of foods she deemed “healthy” shrank and shrank. Breakfast became a handful of granola, lunch a chicken breast, dinner a salad. She avoided scales—the moment she started quantifying her weight loss, some part of her felt she’d have to admit she had a problem. But she could feel the changes in the body: Her skin dried out, and her hair felt like straw. She stopped getting her period.'

'One night at her parents’ house, in the spring of 2004, Payne stepped on a scale for the first time in months and learned that she weighed less than 100 pounds, down from about 120 at the beginning of the school year.'   [based on her height of 5'4'' thats a BMI 17 or less]

'Payne would eventually be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, but only after she hid her eating disorder for the better part of a year, even, to some extent, from herself.'

Payne was quite clear in the film that she doesn't feel she's recovered yet 15 years later.  Hopefully nobody thinks that kind of story is the acceptable face of the climbing 'obsession problem'.

[MischaHY]

Aren't we and the film conflating two different things here? Eating disorders as mental illness/ body dysmorphia etc. and someone dieting as one of a range of obsessive behaviours as a result of being obsessive about a sport.

No, I don't think so. The point I think people are making is about how easy it is for one to lead to the other.

I  may be wrong, but I'd say we are somewhat conflating them at times (especially early on in the thread but less so now).. but like I said earlier, I think it's hard to neatly separate "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different in some ways and yet have huge overlaps in others... At what point does misguided dedication to something become a disorder? When you can't stop? Or when looking back you realised it wasn't good for you but you were in control at the time? I'd guess more people in climbing would be falling into the latter (i.e. screwing up) than the can't-stop (i.e. full-blown ED)?



As a point of order:

One day (when the scale was reading 72kg), I accidentally dropped it and smashed the glass. I went out and bought a new scale, set it all up and then weighed myself to make sure it was all working. The dial read 79kg - my old scale was evidently already broken. I was absolutely devastated because I'd put myself through all this restriction, low energy and generally feeling rubbish for nothing - my weight hadn't changed one bit.

This story as told relies on the original scale going out of calibration over the course of the dieting, but it's also possible that you had lost the weight and the original set of scales was always ~10% underreading.

The main thrust I guess tells us that dieting doesn't work for everyone, even in the short-term. My experience has always been the total opposite - my best ever year corresponded with being so light that I was convinced the scales I was on were underreading until I stood on some other ones a while later. It's possible that I wasn't healthy at that point, but here's the real fucker, which I feel slightly reluctant to post online, would I have done 2016/2017 any differently if you'd told me it wasn't good for my longer term health or climbing? I really don't know*..

I did wonder about this but it explained a lot because if I weighed myself at my girlfriends mum's place I always weighed a lot more but she told me her scales were dodgy (they are, but only by a kilo or two for me as I later found out). I reckon the scales were just knackered and it happened to coincide with me weighing myself a lot.

The message I took from it is that it's better to a usual healthy diet with protein and veggies and all that business and just focus on getting strong. If it doesn't work, there's always multipitch 

EDIT: thinking about this I see what you're getting at in that perhaps my original numbers were off and I did drop down a bit. Possible - but considering that my weight stayed rock solid since that point despite eating lots more, I'm inclined to think not.

EDIT 2: Clearly whilst interesting this actually detracts from my actual point (this was just context) which was that criticism of body image and body shaming and diet culture are VERY much prevelant in the climbing community and I was pushed into trying to lose weight directly as a result of that.

[IanP]

Well maybe this is actually one of those debates that might sound different with more female input... Anyone can suffer from ED's, but it is more prevalent amongst women. You could see this demonstrated in the film, that Angie struggled with seeing Emily climbing so well whilst being so thin. Whether this was purely concern for her friend or also partly jealousy is not thoroughly explained. However, girls often look at other girls in a comparative way. I don't personally suffer from an ED, but I know the feeling of wishing I had someone else's body, especially if they are climbing hard with no body fat. Instagram does not help with this!!

I agree with what Stu said about weight loss being a tool for top performance and that it would be easy to fall into the trap of trying to sustain this. I have experienced this in the past, and wondered why my form went so downhill. But if I was also more concerned with looking skinny, not just climbing well, then it would have been exponentially harder to break that cycle. Dangerous situation indeed for those susceptible to this type of thinking.

I try not to sterotype from my experiences but agree the current stats appear to show EDs to be more prevelant in women, though estimates now are that up 25% are male.  Possibly more importantly the great majority of EDs show onset in the adolescent / young adult age groups and maybe this is an area where we really should be looking at how the climbing community behaves.

From my perspective as a (late!) middle aged guy who's weight has been pretty stable for 15 years how I manage that weight is probably pretty irrelevant to the issues raised in the film.  This was my problem with the earlier discussions - not some issue with discussing diet, just not really thinking it was very relevant or particularly useful.  As my daughter said reading this thread earlier this afternoon 'Now they're discussing whether you need to f**king diet to climb 8a!!'.

[NaoB]

Well maybe this is actually one of those debates that might sound different with more female input... Anyone can suffer from ED's, but it is more prevalent amongst women. You could see this demonstrated in the film, that Angie struggled with seeing Emily climbing so well whilst being so thin. Whether this was purely concern for her friend or also partly jealousy is not thoroughly explained. However, girls often look at other girls in a comparative way. I don't personally suffer from an ED, but I know the feeling of wishing I had someone else's body, especially if they are climbing hard with no body fat. Instagram does not help with this!!

I agree with what Stu said about weight loss being a tool for top performance and that it would be easy to fall into the trap of trying to sustain this. I have experienced this in the past, and wondered why my form went so downhill. But if I was also more concerned with looking skinny, not just climbing well, then it would have been exponentially harder to break that cycle. Dangerous situation indeed for those susceptible to this type of thinking.

I try not to sterotype from my experiences but agree the current stats appear to show EDs to be more prevelant in women, though estimates now are that up 25% are male.  Possibly more importantly the great majority of EDs show onset in the adolescent / young adult age groups and maybe this is an area where we really should be looking at how the climbing community behaves.

From my perspective as a (late!) middle aged guy who's weight has been pretty stable for 15 years how I manage that weight is probably pretty irrelevant to the issues raised in the film.  This was my problem with the earlier discussions - not some issue with discussing diet, just not really thinking it was very relevant or particularly useful.  As my daughter said reading this thread earlier this afternoon 'Now they're discussing whether you need to f**king diet to climb 8a!!'.

Agreed it is easy to stray from the topic a bit. I'd like to hear more of your daughter's thoughts on this if she's willing to share?

I also want to point out that I'm well aware there are multiple different triggers for ED's - it's not all about striving for the supermodel figure, sometimes they follow extreme trauma, or give a person power over something when everything else feels out of control. It is absolutely no leap to say that trying to achieve excellence in your sport could be a common trigger. I know this is an extreme example, but look at ballet for instance. It is almost accepted and encouraged to be unhealthily thin at the top level.

[NaoB]

Aren't we and the film conflating two different things here? Eating disorders as mental illness/ body dysmorphia etc. and someone dieting as one of a range of obsessive behaviours as a result of being obsessive about a sport.

No, I don't think so. The point I think people are making is about how easy it is for one to lead to the other.

I  may be wrong, but I'd say we are somewhat conflating them at times (especially early on in the thread but less so now).. but like I said earlier, I think it's hard to neatly separate "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different in some ways and yet have huge overlaps in others... At what point does misguided dedication to something become a disorder? When you can't stop? Or when looking back you realised it wasn't good for you but you were in control at the time? I'd guess more people in climbing would be falling into the latter (i.e. screwing up) than the can't-stop (i.e. full-blown ED)?



As a point of order:

One day (when the scale was reading 72kg), I accidentally dropped it and smashed the glass. I went out and bought a new scale, set it all up and then weighed myself to make sure it was all working. The dial read 79kg - my old scale was evidently already broken. I was absolutely devastated because I'd put myself through all this restriction, low energy and generally feeling rubbish for nothing - my weight hadn't changed one bit.

This story as told relies on the original scale going out of calibration over the course of the dieting, but it's also possible that you had lost the weight and the original set of scales was always ~10% underreading.

The main thrust I guess tells us that dieting doesn't work for everyone, even in the short-term. My experience has always been the total opposite - my best ever year corresponded with being so light that I was convinced the scales I was on were underreading until I stood on some other ones a while later. It's possible that I wasn't healthy at that point, but here's the real fucker, which I feel slightly reluctant to post online, would I have done 2016/2017 any differently if you'd told me it wasn't good for my longer term health or climbing? I really don't know*..

I did wonder about this but it explained a lot because if I weighed myself at my girlfriends mum's place I always weighed a lot more but she told me her scales were dodgy (they are, but only by a kilo or two for me as I later found out). I reckon the scales were just knackered and it happened to coincide with me weighing myself a lot.

The message I took from it is that it's better to a usual healthy diet with protein and veggies and all that business and just focus on getting strong. If it doesn't work, there's always multipitch 

EDIT: thinking about this I see what you're getting at in that perhaps my original numbers were off and I did drop down a bit. Possible - but considering that my weight stayed rock solid since that point despite eating lots more, I'm inclined to think not.

EDIT 2: Clearly whilst interesting this actually detracts from my actual point (this was just context) which was that criticism of body image and body shaming and diet culture are VERY much prevelant in the climbing community and I was pushed into trying to lose weight directly as a result of that.

I have a friend who has suffered from anorexia for many years, triggered by one throwaway comment by an oblivious person. Thanks for your reminder that we should be more thoughtful when speaking to each other, and less judgemental. Same goes for what Stu said about his beach photos. Banter can cause a lot of harm in some cases!

[mrjonathanr]

Having skimmed through the thread I think it is worth stressing this is about mental illness.

The accompanying physical illness (which soberingly leads to the highest mortality of all mental illnesses) is just that; companion to a mental condition. It isn't the other way round, so it needs to be viewed from that perspective.

Take alcoholism as an example of an addiction: it does not matter if the road in was social anxiety, a lack of self confidence, an instinctive reaction to its euphoric effect- these roads lead to the same place and recovery needs to start there. Anorexia/bulimia is a specific mental condition, no matter how varied the different apparent 'causes' may be. They are just paths to a condition, they should not be confused with the condition itself.

edit - posts crossed NaoB, my post is not a comment on yours! + simplified post

[abarro81]

It is almost accepted and encouraged to be unhealthily thin at the top level.

This is where I find it hard to know how to separate the "screwing up"/"being unhealthy" from the "eating disorder" in climbing, or anything else. I know very little about the ballet world, but presumably a fair chunk of them are unhealthily thin and have EDs, but a chunk may also be just as unhealthily thin without having an ED, and they're making a calculated decision with knowledge of the potential consequences? Presumably unless you really get inside someone's head it can be tricky to know which is which? Or do people think that it becomes obvious somehow?
(I think Teaboy may be coming from, broadly, some similar thoughts to mine here?)


Mischa - yeah, I meant what you said in your edit, but you're right, it's very much a sideline to your main point!

Edit: the bulk of my above post is why I don't think I agree with this:

This was my problem with the earlier discussions - not some issue with discussing diet, just not really thinking it was very relevant or particularly useful. 

It's relevant because it's very hard to separate out the two things, even if they're fundamentally quite different, so discussion will naturally spill across both IMO.

[IanP]

Having skimmed through the thread I think it is worth stressing this is about mental illness.

The accompanying physical illness (which soberingly leads to the highest mortality of all mental illnesses) is just that; companion to a mental condition. It isn't the other way round, so it needs to be viewed from that perspective.

Couldn't agree more - and the pain and difficulties that the mental illness can cause can be really great irrespective of whether it reaches the point of significant physical impacts.

[Fiend]

Thanks for your reminder that we should be more thoughtful when speaking to each other, and less judgemental. Same goes for what Stu said about his beach photos. Banter can cause a lot of harm in some cases!

Highlighting this to continue it from Bonjoy's similar point at the start of the thread. I think there are fuzzy but blindingly fucking obvious lines you don't cross in banter unless you are very very good friends with someone and/or know full well the jibes will be taken well, and those lines are around personal insults including but not limited to ones about someone's personal appearance ESPECIALLY NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF THEIR APPEARANCE THAT ARE DETRIMENTAL TO THEM AND THEY CAN'T / OR STRUGGLE TO CONTROL - which are usually completely off-topic and irrelevant to most banterous situations especially online, as well as potentially harmful. FFS, climbers are all such a bunch of freaks in many "chosen" aspects of their lives and personalities, there's an infintessimally rich mine of piss-taking to be had before resorting to "fatty" etc. And if anyone drags up some 6 year old post where I've called Tomtom a gigantelope or something, go fuck your pedantic self unless TT himself says actually he's ashamed of his height and doesn't like people mentioning it and then you can read my apology.

  etc etc do continue with the proper stuff. Some very good discussion coming out. A bit worrying that a mature adult man of science like Stu considered it quite a challenge to quit the performance dieting, what does that imply for less learned sorts...

[shark]

❄️

[Fiend]

That was a general point of principle, not even referring to you, but you can go take your snowflake to Bonjoy, Stu, and Nao.

[shark]

That was a general point of principle, not even referring to you, but you can go take your snowflake to Bonjoy, Stu, and Nao.

If you dish it out you’re fair game

[Fiend]

I don't dish out personal abuse about likely-sensitive physical issues, and I'm quite prepared to be called up on it if I do. As per exactly what I wrote above. It's not complicated nor obscure, and other people, again listed above, have highlighted it clearly. I've already apologised sincerely to one member of this forum for calling him a bald cunt without  actually thinking how he might feel about his unavoidable baldness.

[Oldmanmatt]

I wanted to make a point about perception, though. With reference to our sometimes assuming somebody has issues, when, in point of fact, you really can’t tell.
I’m just under 182 cm tall.
This is me, warming up, July 2020.
I know, because I track it, I was 79.3kg that day and 18% body fat.
People kept asking if I was ill.
(If you wondered if all that loaded running, MTB and squats had given me enormous legs... uh... no).

Here’s the thing, if I put on 1.5kg from this point, I move from healthy to overweight, according to the NHS charts.

[Will Hunt]

it's hard to neatly separate "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different in some ways and yet have huge overlaps in others... At what point does misguided dedication to something become a disorder? When you can't stop? Or when looking back you realised it wasn't good for you but you were in control at the time? I'd guess more people in climbing would be falling into the latter (i.e. screwing up) than the can't-stop (i.e. full-blown ED)?

I'm not qualified, so maybe I'm wrong; if I'm wrong I'm happy to be corrected. Can we get a professional on here?!

My understanding is that the definition of an eating disorder is very very simple: it is an attitude towards food which causes ill health. The ill health can be either mental or physical or both. I wouldn't be surprised if most eating disorders involved a large dose of mental and physical ill health, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the mental ill health came first in most cases and drove you deeper into the disorder which then started to have a more profound physical effect.

What Mischa describes sounds very clearly like an eating disorder because it caused him to become depressed. Ian's daughter and the people in the film clearly had quite severe eating disorders. People like Shark and Barrows sound, to me, like they walk a very dangerous line, dipping into a zone which if sustained would cause them ill health. It's dangerous not just for the immediate harm it might do to you. The success associated with those peak periods can be addictive, so you stay light for longer, or you try to go lighter still (a fallacy in itself - one thing that this has highlighted is that going too light is very damaging to performance). There are mental health effects which will act as feedback loops which push someone deeper and deeper into this harmful behaviour.

One persons's eating disorder will vary in severity from another's. One of the reasons that this discussion is so challenging is that there are some people who have suffered horribly from severe eating disorders, and there are some people who say that something that might present as a mild/early-stage eating disorder is one of the dark arts that might be courted by someone looking to climb their very best. I don't think we need to shy away from the fact that many top athletes in all sorts of sports will engage in potentially harmful behaviours in pursuit of their art. Even in climbing, anyone who climbs a 8000m+ peak without oxygen does a certain amount of damage to their body along the way.

The issue is made more complex still because everyone is coming at it from a different place. Some are naturally lighter than others, some people find that they perform better at their natural weight, others report that losing a little weight can give them an edge, some put on or lose weight more easily than others, some people seem to find it very easy to lose a bit of weight without suffering ill health, some people would need to drive themselves into horrible ill health just to lose a little weight.

What I'm getting from this is to be more careful about how I talk about this stuff. If anyone follows my Instagram they may have seen footage of Sam at Kilnsey where I note that Sam has lost 10kg over lockdown and is climbing better than ever. Maybe someone hears that, along with every other thing the climbing community blurts out ("train heavy, send light" etc etc) and misses the point that the 10kg was composed almost entirely of wine, beer, a pack of chocolate digestives as a lunchtime snack, and late nights going mad to techno (and everything that normally accompanies that). If I was to try and get in the shape of my life by losing 10kg I'd probably die.

What's great about having this film and this thread is that people are more aware of the diversity of the problem which will help them be forewarned of the dangers, and people will be more mindful of how their language could be harmful.

[webbo]

I think mrjothanr is a professional and I would agree with what he said. However these days I’m an ex professional.

[abarro81]

Would I be right in assuming that

However these days I’m an ex professional.

and

The accompanying physical illness (which soberingly leads to the highest mortality of all mental illnesses) is just that; companion to a mental condition. It isn't the other way round, so it needs to be viewed from that perspective.

Take alcoholism as an example of an addiction: it does not matter if the road in was social anxiety, a lack of self confidence, an instinctive reaction to its euphoric effect- these roads lead to the same place and recovery needs to start there. Anorexia/bulimia is a specific mental condition, no matter how varied the different apparent 'causes' may be. They are just paths to a condition, they should not be confused with the condition itself.

mean that

My understanding is that the definition of an eating disorder is very very simple: it is an attitude towards food which causes ill health. The ill health can be either mental or physical or both. I wouldn't be surprised if most eating disorders involved a large dose of mental and physical ill health, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the mental ill health came first in most cases and drove you deeper into the disorder which then started to have a more profound physical effect.

is not quite right?
Will - your description doesn't make much sense to me, though I appreciate that how I look at it may not actually correspond to how these things are defined. You could have someone who simply makes a decision about accepting ill health based on a (probably poor/erroneous) judgement of probabilities. It doesn't make sense to me to call that an eating disorder, rather than a bad/misguided/risky decision. If you smash in pills a few times and end up in hospital it doesn't mean you necessarily had a drug problem, you just misjudged the risk. Would be interested in webbo/mrjonathanr's view on this if you work in the area...

I wonder if those at risk of making bad calls and those at risk of EDs need different things out of the community or if the solutions to both are the same?

[IanP]

This is where I find it hard to know how to separate the "screwing up"/"being unhealthy" from the "eating disorder" in climbing, or anything else. I know very little about the ballet world, but presumably a fair chunk of them are unhealthily thin and have EDs, but a chunk may also be just as unhealthily thin without having an ED, and they're making a calculated decision with knowledge of the potential consequences? Presumably unless you really get inside someone's head it can be tricky to know which is which? Or do people think that it becomes obvious somehow?
(I think Teaboy may be coming from, broadly, some similar thoughts to mine here?)


Mischa - yeah, I meant what you said in your edit, but you're right, it's very much a sideline to your main point!

Edit: the bulk of my above post is why I don't think I agree with this:

This was my problem with the earlier discussions - not some issue with discussing diet, just not really thinking it was very relevant or particularly useful. 

It's relevant because it's very hard to separate out the two things, even if they're fundamentally quite different, so discussion will naturally spill across both IMO.

I feel I'm struggling to explain my view on this - it's completely clear controlling weight can be part of high standard climbing and that some people can do this in a controlled fashion.  The issue that I would hope would be more important on this thread is how the climbing community reduces problems where people (particular young people) can't do this and move into ED terrority, and equally supports people who are suffering.  Of course its not necessarily easy to tell the difference, but then the question that should be asked is how can we help in this, maybe having a more open environment where people talk more. 

 

[Stu Littlefair]

The issue that I would hope would be more important on this thread is how the climbing community reduces problems where people (particular young people) can't do this and move into ED terrority, and equally supports people who are suffering.  Of course its not necessarily easy to tell the difference, but then the question that should be asked is how can we help in this, maybe having a more open environment where people talk more.

This, surely?

Some professional input, or personal viewpoints would help. It’s striking that people with a relevant history posting online have called for a more open culture, but have also been strongly against being called anorexic in online communities, so there’s clearly a way to raise the issue that’s not welcome or helpful.

But what’s the “right” way to raise concerns or discuss the issue?

[NaoB]

This is where I find it hard to know how to separate the "screwing up"/"being unhealthy" from the "eating disorder" in climbing, or anything else. I know very little about the ballet world, but presumably a fair chunk of them are unhealthily thin and have EDs, but a chunk may also be just as unhealthily thin without having an ED, and they're making a calculated decision with knowledge of the potential consequences? Presumably unless you really get inside someone's head it can be tricky to know which is which? Or do people think that it becomes obvious somehow?
(I think Teaboy may be coming from, broadly, some similar thoughts to mine here?)


Mischa - yeah, I meant what you said in your edit, but you're right, it's very much a sideline to your main point!

Edit: the bulk of my above post is why I don't think I agree with this:

This was my problem with the earlier discussions - not some issue with discussing diet, just not really thinking it was very relevant or particularly useful. 

It's relevant because it's very hard to separate out the two things, even if they're fundamentally quite different, so discussion will naturally spill across both IMO.

I feel I'm struggling to explain my view on this - it's completely clear controlling weight can be part of high standard climbing and that some people can do this in a controlled fashion.  The issue that I would hope would be more important on this thread is how the climbing community reduces problems where people (particular young people) can't do this and move into ED terrority, and equally supports people who are suffering.  Of course its not necessarily easy to tell the difference, but then the question that should be asked is how can we help in this, maybe having a more open environment where people talk more. 

 

There's a chain of education needed here - coaches of up and coming comp superstars in my opinion need to have this topic (healthy nutrition and avoiding ED's) as an important part of their curriculum, which means they need to know what they are talking about, proper information regulated by professionals as opposed to their own opinions.

When I was on the British bouldering team, we had two training sessions a month apart when they measured our body fat with calipers at various marked points, and we were 'encouraged' to drop any excess fat in between.... Looking back, this seems a questionable tactic for coaching elite athletes! We were pretty much explicitly told that we were too fat.

[MischaHY]

it's hard to neatly separate "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different in some ways and yet have huge overlaps in others... At what point does misguided dedication to something become a disorder? When you can't stop? Or when looking back you realised it wasn't good for you but you were in control at the time? I'd guess more people in climbing would be falling into the latter (i.e. screwing up) than the can't-stop (i.e. full-blown ED)?

I'm not qualified, so maybe I'm wrong; if I'm wrong I'm happy to be corrected. Can we get a professional on here?!

My understanding is that the definition of an eating disorder is very very simple: it is an attitude towards food which causes ill health. The ill health can be either mental or physical or both. I wouldn't be surprised if most eating disorders involved a large dose of mental and physical ill health, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the mental ill health came first in most cases and drove you deeper into the disorder which then started to have a more profound physical effect.

What Mischa describes sounds very clearly like an eating disorder because it caused him to become depressed. Ian's daughter and the people in the film clearly had quite severe eating disorders. People like Shark and Barrows sound, to me, like they walk a very dangerous line, dipping into a zone which if sustained would cause them ill health. It's dangerous not just for the immediate harm it might do to you. The success associated with those peak periods can be addictive, so you stay light for longer, or you try to go lighter still (a fallacy in itself - one thing that this has highlighted is that going too light is very damaging to performance). There are mental health effects which will act as feedback loops which push someone deeper and deeper into this harmful behaviour.

One persons's eating disorder will vary in severity from another's. One of the reasons that this discussion is so challenging is that there are some people who have suffered horribly from severe eating disorders, and there are some people who say that something that might present as a mild/early-stage eating disorder is one of the dark arts that might be courted by someone looking to climb their very best. I don't think we need to shy away from the fact that many top athletes in all sorts of sports will engage in potentially harmful behaviours in pursuit of their art. Even in climbing, anyone who climbs a 8000m+ peak without oxygen does a certain amount of damage to their body along the way.

The issue is made more complex still because everyone is coming at it from a different place. Some are naturally lighter than others, some people find that they perform better at their natural weight, others report that losing a little weight can give them an edge, some put on or lose weight more easily than others, some people seem to find it very easy to lose a bit of weight without suffering ill health, some people would need to drive themselves into horrible ill health just to lose a little weight.

What I'm getting from this is to be more careful about how I talk about this stuff. If anyone follows my Instagram they may have seen footage of Sam at Kilnsey where I note that Sam has lost 10kg over lockdown and is climbing better than ever. Maybe someone hears that, along with every other thing the climbing community blurts out ("train heavy, send light" etc etc) and misses the point that the 10kg was composed almost entirely of wine, beer, a pack of chocolate digestives as a lunchtime snack, and late nights going mad to techno (and everything that normally accompanies that). If I was to try and get in the shape of my life by losing 10kg I'd probably die.

What's great about having this film and this thread is that people are more aware of the diversity of the problem which will help them be forewarned of the dangers, and people will be more mindful of how their language could be harmful.

Having read this I feel I used depressed in an inappropriate way, I meant to say that the 12-16 weeks that I spent deliberately trying to lose weight though calorie deficit were mentally uncomfortable due to spending time being hungry.
I certainly wouldn't consider myself to have had compromised mental health in the sense that seeking help would have been necessary. I just didn't like being hungry!

[webbo]

There are so facets to this that there is no easy answers, also eating disorders are generally difficult to treat to the extent that there are specialist regional units to which patients are referred.
I will however offer what I saw through my working experience how I rationalised the concept of mental ill health or mental illness.
If during ones childhood or developmental years you experience trauma of some description. It may influence how you view the world or your place in it. If then at later date say when you leave home or go to university and experience other traumatic experiences. Then there is the potential to have a major psychological issue or mental illness. This may be a way your brain is working to try and protect you from reliving your childhood trauma.
So I would tend to see climbers or other sports people who develop serious eating disorders as individuals who probably would have major psychological issues whether or not they were involved in sport.
I hope this makes some sort of sense as I don’t do this any more. So you lose touch with it all.

[reeve]

I'm also a mental health professional, although I haven't worked specifically with eating disorders. I've been trying to find time to post for a few days so sorry this has turned into war and peace.

it's hard to neatly separate "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different in some ways and yet have huge overlaps in others... At what point does misguided dedication to something become a disorder? When you can't stop? Or when looking back you realised it wasn't good for you but you were in control at the time? I'd guess more people in climbing would be falling into the latter (i.e. screwing up) than the can't-stop (i.e. full-blown ED)?

I'm not qualified, so maybe I'm wrong; if I'm wrong I'm happy to be corrected. Can we get a professional on here?!

My understanding is that the definition of an eating disorder is very very simple: it is an attitude towards food which causes ill health.

I think you've put your finger on exactly what is the problem with defining any kind of mental health diagnosis: it should be simple, but with the categorical diagnositic system we have, it really isn't. How disordered does someone's eating need to be to warrant an ED diagnosis? I don't know. Even with mental health territory that I am much more familiar with (anxiety, depression, personality disorders, etc.) I still don't know. The problem is that this is trying to apply a category to something which exists along multiple continua: the physical health implications, impact on someone's ability to functiion in daily live, adverse consequences on mood... For this reason (amongst others), I'm quite against the whole system of diagnoses. It implies that there is the mentally well, and there is the mentally ill. What if someone copes well some days but less well on others? Where is the boundary? I'm probably labouring the point. However I suspect that trying to apply this categorical system to the problem of disordered eating / problematic relationship to food within climbing, could be why it's so hard to separate out 'misguided dieting for performance benefit' vs 'careful and appropriate diet for performance benefit' vs 'I feel that I must lose weight at all costs even to the detriment to my long-term health'

(I'm on a bit of an anti-diagnosis rant here, but there are other problems with the diagnostic system for mental health difficulties, for example workable system should have categories which are distinct. Most people who meet the criteria for one diagnosis will also meet the criteria for another, or for several. You could speak to ten different people with the same diagnosis yet the form (i.e. the thoughts, patters of behaviour etc) that they would describe, and the nature of the onset, could be different for all of them. I'm definitely now labouring the point). I should probably also caveat this viewpoint, as although it is commong amongst psychologists, I am probably at the anti-diagnosis end of the spectrum compared with some of my colleagues. Also, even I can see that diagnoses can b helpful where it gives someone a name for something which they have wordlessly struggled against, and provides a quick way of communicating the bare bones of the nature of someone's difficulties)

I'm really glad to see that some of the discussion has moved to anxieties about appearance too. Although climbing is very inclusive, it is over-represents lean, toned, and muscular folk (obvs). Given the role of altered perception of one's own physique in the develpment of disordered eating (i.e. even very very thin people with disordered eating may genuinely see themselves as overweight when looking in the mirror - a perceptual distortion), I'd imagine that this would be exacerbated by comparisons with peers amongst climbers (compared to the general public). Funnilly enough, I tried to start this paragraph by stating that I am a xyz physique, but I really didn't know how to describe myself? I don't even know how others would see me, and for a moment I had a pang of anxiety about writing the 'wrong' thing and getting corrected by someone who knows me - what an easy trap to fall into that must be...

  etc etc do continue with the proper stuff. Some very good discussion coming out. A bit worrying that a mature adult man of science like Stu considered it quite a challenge to quit the performance dieting, what does that imply for less learned sorts...

Just a thought on this, although I suspect that you didn't meant to imply it, I don't think that intelligence can innoculate anyone against the kind of thoughts which can lead to disordered eating (i.e. thoughts that 'I am not good enough' 'I need to be thinner to fit in' 'I look ugly like this'). These kind of thoughts - which I am sure everyone is suceptible to to varying degrees - are not open to dispassionate reasoning because they are driven by very strong emotions (and may be based on earlier trauma, such as bullying, as Webbo described). In fact, with a quick google scholar cherry picking search, there seems to be a lot of evidence that disordered eating is associated with difficulties in emotion regulation.


Final thought: good points Will, Stu, and Fiend about how careful we should be with 'banter' about weight. It should go without saying that this is entirely context dependent. Having said that, I'm not ever confident enough to judge a context as being safe to piss-take about someone's weight but maybe that's just me.

One more final thought: thanks to those who've posted with their own experiences of difficulties with eating. There are so many reasons why this is an easy trap for anyone to fall into that I think losing stigma around it is so important to allow others to talk about their own difficulties. Thanks for leading the way on that.