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Body weight, image, and eating disorders (Read 40180 times)

Potash

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We could combat this by ensuring that climbing moved to having a standardised personal weight. All routes would be graded using this metric and if you wanted to take the "proper tick" you would need to either weigh the weight or to carry extra to make up the weight.

It would be like the use of knee pads. Of course you could diet and climb "hard grades" but everyone would knowingly mutter under their breath about it being cheating.

In comps they would weigh you before you tied on and then hand you a few extra kg.

Liamhutch89

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We could combat this by ensuring that climbing moved to having a standardised personal weight. All routes would be graded using this metric and if you wanted to take the "proper tick" you would need to either weigh the weight or to carry extra to make up the weight.

It would be like the use of knee pads. Of course you could diet and climb "hard grades" but everyone would knowingly mutter under their breath about it being cheating.

In comps they would weigh you before you tied on and then hand you a few extra kg.

Music to my ears. I'm continually reminded that I can take a grade off for lank, but seldom told I can add one back on for weight!

Perhaps remove a grade for every 4 inches taller than the FA and add a grade for every 10kg above?  :goodidea:

shark

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Desire for peer recognition of low body fat (‘tops off for power’ etc)

Tops off for power magic still works when no one is around - even when you aren’t recording

JamieG

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I look around and see a lot of unhealthy climbers. Maybe I’ve spent too much time at The Foundry?! It’s just accepted, especially amongst men.
Genuine question. What visible signs are you judging these climbers to be unhealthy by?
Frequent injury occurrence.

I suspect this is a more common issue than people recognise. I knew a girl that was a super keen runner and also was very controlled about her diet (I suspect had an easting disorder but obviously I'm not qualified to say). She got stuck in cycles of getting a muscle injury, trying to recover (but I suspect not having enough energy/nutrients etc to properly mend), then trying to build up strength again too quickly with more intense training, re-injury etc etc. She was obsessed with being healthy, but from my point of view she was just damaging herself more. But I think she was almost addicted to the process of training, controlling diet, "being healthy". I wasn't nice to watch but I also didn't feel like I could say anything apart from encouraging her to rest well and let it heal.

abarro81

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Ironically given the conversation, I feel like (at least online) climbing conversation is a full 180 from the "light is right" mentality of days gone by. My insta feed is bombarded by people telling me not to get light vs those prophesising the way of the broccoli. I suspect this is partly driven by what it considered both cool and acceptable to say on social media, partly by some realisation that relentless dieting is actually bad for performance long term, and partly by the new comp style which rewards leg power in a way that old-school crimping doesn't. I probably wouldn't dare "speak up" for dropping a few kgs on insta, despite not being afraid of an online scrap.

But I think there are potentially a whole range of unhealthy behaviours in lots of sports that are just accepted, rightly or wrongly

With the caveat that I know very little about this, I have a strong suspicion that both the "enjoying the pain" part of training, lifting etc and the feeling you get out soloing has some underlying crossovers with drivers for self-harm (e.g. "Self-harm proved to me I was real, I was alive. At times it also silenced the chaos in my head" - https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/self-harm/why-people-self-harm/). I suspect for some (many?) that sport, training, soloing etc are like the opposite of a gateway drug - it's what stops you passing through the gateway into worse stuff, but doesn't mean you don't still channel some of that underlying feeling into unhealthy actions and thoughts. I may just be projecting my current mental state onto other times and people here though.

'feeling floaty' - 'lost a kilo or two and climbing well' etc..
At the risk of being the old prick in the corner complaining about people being PC and voting for UKIP, if saying things like that become considered unacceptable on the forum then count me out of here. The second is, after all, a factual statement with causality left to our best guesses.

Frequent injury occurrence
Can happen without eating disorders. I can name a few "bigger" blokes who have as many injury problems as the dieters. That's not me arguing that eating can't cause injury problems - it can - but I'd be surprised if the idea that you can use injury issues as a reliable marker of an underlying hormonal issue or eating disorder would stand up to much scrutiny. [Relevant n=1 anecdotes: after the talk about REDs at Awesome Walls a year or two back, and given my history of flip-flopping weight and injuries, I had my bloods done while in diet mode; testosterone etc was all normal... which doesn't demonstrate that none of my injuries are due to dieting, but puts a minor indicator against. I've injured myself whilst heavy, medium and light... but never whilst in light-light mode. It's almost like other things are key in determining injury too.]

abarro81

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Kai Lightner's coaching telling him he will never be good because he is too heavy, l
This is obviously dumb and unacceptable

Bonjoy

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I look around and see a lot of unhealthy climbers. Maybe I’ve spent too much time at The Foundry?! It’s just accepted, especially amongst men.
Genuine question. What visible signs are you judging these climbers to be unhealthy by?

Very low body fat percentage. Frequent references to dieting/unhealthy diet and undereating. References to other’s body shape. Frequent injury occurrence. Desire for peer recognition of low body fat (‘tops off for power’ etc)
Okay, so more what they say and do rather than just what you see.
Some of the healthiest people I know are also objectively 'skinny'. I've met people with very low weight who seem to eat more than the average. Metabolisms are highly variable and I suspect some of the prevalence of thinness in hard climbers is because a 'naturally' thin physique is beneficial for power to weight ratio so is overrepresented near the top. None of which is to suggest there isn't a problem, especially at elite comp level, with disordered eating. There is, most of us have heard various anecdotes, or know of affected individuals. I'd just say that it's important we don't stigmatise body shape at either end of the scale. Judging based on under weight appearance is no better than judging based on over weight appearance.
« Last Edit: February 03, 2021, 01:56:03 pm by Bonjoy »

Fiend

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I'd just say that it's important we don't stigmatise body shape at either end of the scale. Judging based on under weight appearance is no better than judging based on over weight appearance.
Hear that from your fellow moderator, @Shark and @Duncan Disorderly??? And that includes not huffing like a contrary teenager when someone admonishes you for slagging off someone's personal appearance in a serious online debate.


Also talking of both ends of the scale....

You may ask how much does 10lb matter? Well imagine projecting at your limit with an extra 10lbs!
A mere 4.5kg, pissing hell that would be nice  :lol: :lol: :lol:

spidermonkey09

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A surprising amount of resistance to the idea that climbing and eating disorders might have some crossover, which surprises me. The connection seems quite obvious to me and has been under the surface of climbing for years. We've all heard rumours about someone or other I'm sure.

Interested in why this is prompting such pushback. There are a lot of comments here that come across as pretty defensive; lots of 'not all men are like that' kind of energy! Is it not enough to raise awareness of the risks that climbing might pose to a healthy relationship with food? If you don't think it applies to you, thats great, but I think you'd have to be blind not to see the potential risk to young climbers, and young female climbers in particular. This piece is very good on that issue.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/ukc/growing_pains_-_the_weight_of_womanhood-688324

abarro81

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A surprising amount of resistance to the idea that climbing and eating disorders might have some crossover, which surprises me.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that. Sounds like you're falling into the trap of thinking that you're not allowed to have actual discussion around touchy subjects...

Duma

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A surprising amount of resistance to the idea that climbing and eating disorders might have some crossover, which surprises me.

I have seen none at all?

spidermonkey09

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I don't think anyone is suggesting that. Sounds like you're falling into the trap of thinking that you're not allowed to have actual discussion around touchy subjects...

Paraphrasing:

'other sports are unusual as well'
'normal isn't healthy anyway'
'projecting eating disorder issues onto everything she sees'
'but climbing has made loads of people healthy'
'climbers are much healthier than the general population'
'heavier climbers get injured too'
'loads of healthy people are skinny'

Clearly I have stripped the context from the above but I still think its interesting that these are the first responses of people. To me, they come across as pretty defensive. YMMV but to me, that indicates part of the problem as it currently exists; the sport is yet to fully confront it and instead puts its head in the sand.

gme

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Desire for peer recognition of low body fat (‘tops off for power’ etc)

Tops off for power magic still works when no one is around - even when you aren’t recording

Very few if any 50 year old men should take off there tops in public, many should also think about it in private.

abarro81

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To me, they come across as pretty defensive. YMMV but to me, that indicates part of the problem as it currently exists; the sport is yet to fully confront it and instead puts its head in the sand.

To me 6/7 come across as either factually correct or likely to be factually correct (hadn't clocked 'projecting eating disorder issues onto everything she sees'), and as being relevant to the conversation. They probably do also read as defensive, but that neither makes them wrong nor less relevant nor implies your conclusion IMO. And yes, stripping context and caveats makes things easy to attack, I use that trick too.

p.s. if anyone feels like there's a lack of awareness around this in climbing I guess they don't follow the same insta accounts or listen to the same podcasts as me, so this may also affect how much people respond wholly positively or critically to people's comments in this area.

tomtom

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Desire for peer recognition of low body fat (‘tops off for power’ etc)

Tops off for power magic still works when no one is around - even when you aren’t recording

Very few if any 50 year old men should take off there tops in public, many should also think about it in private.

Shark has just started a face book group for 50+ year old climbers to do this online....

spidermonkey09

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To me, they come across as pretty defensive. YMMV but to me, that indicates part of the problem as it currently exists; the sport is yet to fully confront it and instead puts its head in the sand.

To me 6/7 come across as either factually correct or likely to be factually correct (hadn't clocked 'projecting eating disorder issues onto everything she sees'), and as being relevant to the conversation. They probably do also read as defensive, but that neither makes them wrong nor less relevant nor implies your conclusion IMO. And yes, stripping context and caveats makes things easy to attack, I use that trick too.

p.s. if anyone feels like there's a lack of awareness around this in climbing I guess they don't follow the same insta accounts or listen to the same podcasts as me, so this may also affect how much people respond wholly positively or critically to people's comments in this area.

I neither have instagram nor listen to climbing podcasts so I accept I may be out of the loop!

How people frame their response to issues is relevant isnt it. If someone responds to an article about 1500 corona deaths with  a statistic about flu deaths in a year, you can draw a reasonable assumption about their views on lockdown. Clearly these points of view aren't comparable, but I don't think its unreasonable to point out that quite a few of the responses to this topic have been dominated by caveats or some form of 'what aboutery.' You're right that this is still interesting and (mostly) relevant, but it still says something about the primacy of the issue in peoples minds.

shark

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Very few if any 50 year old men should take off there tops in public, many should also think about it in private.

Shark has just started a face book group for 50+ year old climbers to do this online....

Maybe we should do a calendar at the end of the year

andy popp

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Through the late ‘80s and ‘90s low body weight was promoted as the ideal.

I think, at least initially, there was simply a void in terms of training knowledge and training facilities. In that context, losing weight was an obvious and relatively "easy" (in the short term) path to improving performance, particularly because as a strategy it was well suited to the cutting edge routes of the day. But it did become a kind of ideal, and in a way that became deeply problematic for some people. There must still be a thread of that running through climbing culture.

Bonjoy

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I don't think anyone is suggesting that. Sounds like you're falling into the trap of thinking that you're not allowed to have actual discussion around touchy subjects...

Paraphrasing:

'other sports are unusual as well'
'normal isn't healthy anyway'
'projecting eating disorder issues onto everything she sees'
'but climbing has made loads of people healthy'
'climbers are much healthier than the general population'
'heavier climbers get injured too'
'loads of healthy people are skinny'

Clearly I have stripped the context from the above but I still think its interesting that these are the first responses of people. To me, they come across as pretty defensive. YMMV but to me, that indicates part of the problem as it currently exists; the sport is yet to fully confront it and instead puts its head in the sand.
I'll let other posters address their own decontextualized excerpt. But regards the bottom one, which looks to be taken from a post of mine, the context is in no way 'pushing back' against the idea EDs are an issue in climbing, in fact I stated that they are within the same post.
Really, this is a discussion site and I was making a specific cautionary point regards unintended stigmatisation, which I stand by. I think the fact that this makes you think I have my 'head in the sand' about the subject says more about you than me. Please come back with a counter argument if you disagree on the point I was making. But please don't try to package it up with some discussion blocking dismissive jargon. I really don't feel there is a conversation on any subject if everyone just says 'yay that was great', rather than explore the inevitable caveats, exceptions, issues of perception and unintended consequence which exist in complex social topics such as this.

For reference, the above rant is what a defensive post looks like.  :kiss2:

Bonjoy

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To me, they come across as pretty defensive. YMMV but to me, that indicates part of the problem as it currently exists; the sport is yet to fully confront it and instead puts its head in the sand.

To me 6/7 come across as either factually correct or likely to be factually correct (hadn't clocked 'projecting eating disorder issues onto everything she sees'), and as being relevant to the conversation. They probably do also read as defensive, but that neither makes them wrong nor less relevant nor implies your conclusion IMO. And yes, stripping context and caveats makes things easy to attack, I use that trick too.

p.s. if anyone feels like there's a lack of awareness around this in climbing I guess they don't follow the same insta accounts or listen to the same podcasts as me, so this may also affect how much people respond wholly positively or critically to people's comments in this area.

I neither have instagram nor listen to climbing podcasts so I accept I may be out of the loop!

How people frame their response to issues is relevant isnt it. If someone responds to an article about 1500 corona deaths with  a statistic about flu deaths in a year, you can draw a reasonable assumption about their views on lockdown. Clearly these points of view aren't comparable, but I don't think its unreasonable to point out that quite a few of the responses to this topic have been dominated by caveats or some form of 'what aboutery.' You're right that this is still interesting and (mostly) relevant, but it still says something about the primacy of the issue in peoples minds.
Don't get me started on 'what aboutary'. Probably the most egregious bit of debate avoidance jargon du jour IMO.

abarro81

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I don't think its unreasonable to point out that quite a few of the responses to this topic have been dominated by caveats or some form of 'what aboutery.'

I don't really disagree with this, although it's probably what you'd expect. People critique bits that they think are missing or erroneous in others' posts, not the good bits on the whole. I don't think you'd find anyone who thinks that there isn't a crossover between eating issues and climbing, and I would stand by the view that it doesn't support the statement about "resistance to the idea that climbing and eating disorders might have some crossover". Maybe it's just semantics. I suspect a lot of this is how much discussion you've seen elsewhere as I alluded to - if you see this as shining a light into a dark corner then your main take away is "look at all the skeletons"; if you feel like it's a fairly well lit corner of the room then you're more likely to respond with the observation that some of the bones are from a skeleton dummy, as well as the human ones. I'm struggling with the analogy here, but sure you know what I mean. 

Will Hunt

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Edit: I think things have moved on since I wrote this. TL:DR is that the incidence of climbing-related ED's is probably not very well understood, and it's not as simple as pointing to Malham and saying "look at all the skinny people". If you think that a climbing-induced eating disorder will manifest as a skinny person then you're wrong.



I'm not sure anyone is denying that there exist some really nasty eating disorders in climbing, which have been brought about by climbing. But the scale of the problem across climbing? I'd say we have very little idea. It's very difficult to tell who has an eating disorder unless you overhear them say very specific things about their attitude towards food. An eating disorder is when you have an unhealthy attitude towards food, which can include obsessing over what you eat and what that does to your body.

It's not unusual for keen climbers who are trying to maximise performance to be mindful of how much they weigh. Their attitudes might range from desperately trying to lose weight all the time, to cutting a little weight for Sendtember, to not snacking or eating refined sugar in a bid to avoid excess weight above what might be their healthy norm. Within that spectrum you've got behaviours which clearly are disorderly and behaviours which probably aren't. In most cases you wouldn't be able to tell who had a disorder and who didn't just by looking at them.

Case in point. Of all my friends, I can think of one who is the most likely to have an eating disorder. He is of average height and average build. If you offer him a spare choccy bar from your bag at the end of the day he will refuse. "Empty calories, mate". He watches what he eats and tries not to exceed what he perceives to be the amount of food that keeps his weight in equilibrium. If you were to stand us next to each other and ask the panel "who has the eating disorder", all fingers would point to me. I can assure you in the most certain terms that I do not have an eating disorder. Is my friend's behaviour obsessive? Probably. Might somebody say he has an eating disorder if they overheard our conversation at the crag? Maybe. Is it unhealthy (the definition of an eating disorder)? Without getting him to lie down on the metaphorical couch and describe in detail how his eating and his weight affect his emotions you just can't tell.

spidermonkey09

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That certainly was defensive!  :o

As it happens, I don't disagree with large parts of your post. I certainly didn't mean to be dismissive (I don't think I was!) or imply that you specifically have your head in the sand, although I accept that by paraphrasing I'm making a rod for my own back.

I would maintain though, that when a thread is started on a topic like this, and a large proportion of the responses carry caveats, that that says something interesting about attitudes to the topic. You clearly don't agree, which is fine, but thats the point I'm making. I think there is an instinctive reluctance in climbing to truly confront the issue, for all sorts of reasons; love of the sport and  desire to 'defend' it, misunderstanding of eating disorders and how they affect people, perhaps a belief (still widespread among the gen pop) that eating disorders aren't a 'real' condition, a long standing belief that weight loss is a good tactic for hard climbing that has endured since the 80s and is part of a culture that a lot of climbers still hold very dear.

I am NOT saying you hold any of the above views or being remotely accusatory. I am suggesting that such views are widespread and that some of the caveats being (repeatedly) brought up in this thread are evidence of that. 

Liamhutch89

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I neither have instagram nor listen to climbing podcasts so I accept I may be out of the loop!


I guess i'm relatively new to climbing (4 or 5 years or so), so I don't know enough about old broccoli diet's, but I do have Instagram and have listened to climbing podcasts. All I see on Instagram are muscle-bound climbers performing incredible feats of strength, topless. I concede this could be equally damaging to some people. For example, in gym circles this imagery leads many people to steroids. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the top climbers were using PED's  :worms: But I certainly don't see unhealthy low weight being promoted for climbing on the internet.   

shark

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Having reflected on the film a few personal thoughts.

Can only speak for myself but body composition is one performance subset of my obsession to be the best climber I can. Other subsets include fingerboarding, blancos, siege tactics etc.

I weigh myself every day to keep a check and get a weekly average. Typically I only very gradually lose or gain weight which is matter of public record on Power Club.

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve got my weight/fat level down seasonally to a level that would I think be unhealthy if I kept it at that level long term rather than to coincide with attempting to redpoint the Oak.

I have a feel for the level that’s unhealthy for me as once I reach or dip below 11 stone I start to feel a bit weird mentally and physically after a few weeks by which stage I’ll almost certainly be burnt out or conditions will have crapped out so happy to start putting weight back on to get back to a sustainable level. Personally I’m comfortable with this approach.

I’ve also had a few weigh ins over the years on the Collegiate body comp machine so have a reasonable handle on where my fat % is which seems to be the most reliable marker on how far you can push personal weight loss.

Also training to get strength gains whilst underweight is going to be compromised so apart from the myriad other issues I think you are shooting yourself in the foot keeping your weight permanently low if the reason is to perform well.

Like I say I can only speak for myself. I’m naturally a chunkier body type and a constant struggle to get or keep my weight where I want it to be at any particular time. Other people have different metabolisms and body types.

Whether my approach is appropriate, unhealthy or fucked up depends on your own view but Im sure it’s not pathological in the way described in the film by the interviewed climbers.

However, if tracking my weight on Power Club or talking about my approach to weight in the way I have above is triggering or part of an insidious community groupthink I’m quite happy to keep such things to myself.

 

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