[Johnny Brown]

i.e. for a few of your "top" performances not just one, but would broadly agree.

I'd hoped that would be implied by the fact that you won't know the top one until your career is over, so yes for pushing your grade limit, which might happen several times.

But my point is while most might diet to climb 9a, nobody should need to diet to climb 8a.

The problem being if its widely known that climbing 9a involves dieting, people will assume it is a short cut to climb 7a.

[andy_e]

This "shortcut to success" is definitely where the peril and risk of developing disordered eating lies.

[mburke]

With no personal experience of this, and happy to be corrected, is this potentially similar to other situations in life where people with pre-dispositions to mental illness become more susceptible to suffering in particular environments. For instance, alcoholics may stay away from pubs, gambling addicts avoid casinos. I probably have more personal experience with these two. So thinking in this way, we don't want people with susceptibility to EDs to have to stay away from climbing gyms, the emphasis might be, as a solution, on ways we can collectively make those environments safer for those individuals.

I don't want this to become about limiting speech or anything, but if I suggest a holiday with friends, I'll probably avoid suggesting Vegas.

[andy_e]

I don't drink any more but I'm happy to go to a pub where the enviroment and culture doesn't make me feel like I need to drink to be in that space.

[mburke]

Fair enough, I think thats interesting - I know people who feel the same.

I know some who have to abstain completely

[User deactivated.]

nobody should need to diet to climb 8a.

7a and i'd agree, but considering that 99% of the climbing population will never climb 8a, I think that's a pretty high level to climb without having any consideration of your weight. If you're already light or still growing then this obviously doesn't apply, but most people aren't already light as bodyweight vaguely follows a Normal distribution / bell curve, but is skewed towards the heavy side.

If I don't watch my diet I trend up to 15 stone, but by watching it, which is to say dieting but still eating more than the average person, I can comfortably hover just over 13 stone and feel healthier and better for doing so (still only climbing a mere 7c). I am of average weight too so not unusual.

I really do sympathise with anyone who develops an ED, particularly if that's in any part due to climbing culture. This is why diet needs to be an open conversation as others have posted.

[shark]

With no personal experience of this, and happy to be corrected, is this potentially similar to other situations in life where people with pre-dispositions to mental illness become more susceptible to suffering in particular environments.

That may be also be the case but the film is mainly focused on top athletes who for the most part will do anything that they perceive will improve their performance even if it is harmful to their health.

This was linked on the UKB Facebook page and is a clear demonstration that Olympic level sport is almost by definition very unhealthy.

[mburke]

Ah good point, yes if we are speaking strictly about top athletes - I guess physical/mental damage to achieve a 99th percentile performance is certainly not new. I'm sure there's reference to something similar in one of the many Lance Armstrong docs about how cycling the mountains in the south of France is just not good for the human body (caveat that they are doing 50kmh on flats)

[IanP]

I'd probably drop it into the toolkit slightly earlier than you suggest, i.e. for a few of your "top" performances not just one, but would broadly agree. Certainly I'd agree that a teen or 20-something would be best not going down that route, and certainly not extensively - leave it for when you can't just come back in a year or two knowing you'll be better/stronger by then. I suspect I've made errors in the past on this front.

To some extent this is why I don't like it when it seems like people try to shut down or somewhat shame those engaging in critical discussion - I think you need that discussion to convince people it's a trick for near the bottom of the "things to try" list not the top. Otherwise it's just a "don't do drugs because they're bad, and don't ask questions" vibe, which I think a motivated performance-focused climber might find rather unconvincing. I know I would. Perhaps this is just a problem with separating "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders", which are very different but also quite hard to really separate out due to the overlaps...

I certainly wasn't trying to shutdown debate (and I don't think others were) - just move the debate back to the  film and issues around eating disorders.  It feels a lot (most?) of this thread has been about how climbing is power to weight driven sport and we must accept that being light is important, obviously true as it is of a number of other sports but there's been much less discussion around how this impacts potentially vulnerable people and what the climbing community might do about.

Often the discussion on UKB is of a pretty high standard compared to other places on the internet and I would hope that we could do the same on this subject. 

You raised a good point regarding "screwing up by dieting" vs "eating disorders" - this would be just the sort of stuff it might be useful to discuss, but maybe gets hidden by starting of with slightly defensive (no offense  ) statement about being shutdown.

[Dac]

With regards to the “shortcuts to success”, whereby there is the risk that newcomers to climbing may erroneously associate weight loss with climbing performance, I suspect that this is now more of an issue than it once was.

Not too long ago the only direct associations between climbing performance and weight were along the lines of “climber x in the mags is skinny as a rake, and they’ve just climbed hard route y. If I was skinny I’d be good too”. However modern approaches to training, specifically fingerboarding, tend to focus of weight quite explicitly; usually along the lines of ‘can you hang one-handed off edge size x, because all the good climbers can’.

It doesn’t take much of a leap for your hypothetical impressionable young keener to be thinking that if they can currently hold a training edge with 5 or 6kg body weight offset with a pulley, then if they weighed 5 or 6kg less then they could hold it unassisted and be the toast of Instagram, even if the reality would be quite different.

[Johnny Brown]

7a and i'd agree, but considering that 99% of the climbing population will never climb 8a, I think that's a pretty high level to climb without having any consideration of your weight.

Semantics I suppose - I wouldn't call a healthy lifestyle where you avoid over-eating 'dieting', or having no consideration of your weight. I don't weigh myself from one year to the next but I notice if my belly gets flabby.

I chose 8a advisedly because it is the lower bound of elite performance. I don't think you need to do any more than maintain a healthy lifestyle to climb 8a. Dieting as a redpoint tactic to go below a healthy weight is the issue - and shouldn't be a consideration for 99% of climbers.

The wider context of this is the sportification of climbing and an increasing emphasis on 'progression' and 'achievement'. I have always considered climbing a pastime like hillwalking where the rewards are not easily commodified. I enjoy climbing (relatively) hard now and again but it's not why I go climbing. I'm very aware of the subjectivity of the grading system and place a lot more value on moving well and enjoyment. Not sure how or if a cultural shift in this direction is possible but a worthy goal imo.

[shark]

It doesn’t take much of a leap for your hypothetical impressionable young keener to be thinking that if they can currently hold a training edge with 5 or 6kg body weight offset with a pulley, then if they weighed 5 or 6kg less then they could hold it unassisted and be the toast of Instagram, even if the reality would be quite different.

Trouble is it isn’t likely to be different unless they lost some of that mass in their forearms or shoulder strength is the limiter.

[Banana finger]

For me it came down to  "would I rather be a fucking miserable 8B boulderer or a reasonably happy 7C/(soft)8A boulderer".
I chose the latter and am glad i did.

I guess dieting to the extreme may push your max grade maybe by a + or even a letter.....Back in the day, for a lot of folk when 8A was close to cutting edge, this could be achieved by dieting since I think genetically most of us are capable of getting up 8A with enough prep.

These days cutting edge is 8C+....Luckily no amount of dieting would get me close to that..i doubt even my skeleton could do lucid dreaming....So now that temptation is gone....maybe thats a good thing. I now firmly acknowledge my genetics suits darts more than climbing.

[Stu Littlefair]

Things have moved on a bit since JBs original reply to me, but I thought it’s worth replying.

Actually, what I meant by my post is very different to what you took from it. Which rather makes your point about it being a bad idea to post up without caveats.

What I tried to express by emphasising the “short term” is that if I want to make a sudden leap in sport climbing standards in the next month, then weight loss will yield bigger gains for me than any other method.

If you’re already very thin then this won’t apply of course. But for most of us it is true and IMO, it’s foolish to deny this.

Its the short term effectiveness of weight loss that leads people into making the error that managing weight is a normal part of the toolkit for long term performance.

In the medium to long term regulating your weight is BAD for your performance. It will make you unhappy, give you less energy to train and limit your strength gains.

But people give it a go for a month or two and get better, so they think “I’ll keep doing that then”.  If they keep dieting their climbing will get worse for sure, but you can’t persuade someone that it’s in their long term interests to eat more if you deny that the weight loss helps at first, otherwise they’ll dismiss your opinion as obviously wrong.

In summary, if I was mentoring a young sport climber someone and they wanted to diet for two months to tick their hardest grade I might cautiously support that - regardless of whether that grade was 8a or 9b. But I would be damn honest with them that they WILL feel tempted to keep on regulating their weight and that this is a bad idea. And I’d want to be sure it was someone who’d be honest with me if they were going to struggle.

[Edit: I crossed out a young sport climber in my original post because I think young people are particularly vunerable and should probably avoid weight loss strategies]

[User deactivated.]

7a and i'd agree, but considering that 99% of the climbing population will never climb 8a, I think that's a pretty high level to climb without having any consideration of your weight.

Semantics I suppose - I wouldn't call a healthy lifestyle where you avoid over-eating 'dieting', or having no consideration of your weight. I don't weigh myself from one year to the next but I notice if my belly gets flabby.

I chose 8a advisedly because it is the lower bound of elite performance. I don't think you need to do any more than maintain a healthy lifestyle to climb 8a. Dieting as a redpoint tactic to go below a healthy weight is the issue - and shouldn't be a consideration for 99% of climbers.

The wider context of this is the sportification of climbing and an increasing emphasis on 'progression' and 'achievement'. I have always considered climbing a pastime like hillwalking where the rewards are not easily commodified. I enjoy climbing (relatively) hard now and again but it's not why I go climbing. I'm very aware of the subjectivity of the grading system and place a lot more value on moving well and enjoyment. Not sure how or if a cultural shift in this direction is possible but a worthy goal imo.

I'm sure we're on the same side of the argument for a lot of the points you have raised. For the avoidance of doubt, I agree that dieting below a healthy weight to climb 8a is a terrible idea. It's probably a terrible idea at 9a too unless a relatively pedestrian 9a can still earn you a living in the age of 9c.

My point was that 'healthy weight' is fairly broad for an individual, never mind the population Therefore, the suggestion that you don't need to diet to climb 8a stuck out, as I think the opposite will be true for many climbers to the right of the bodyweight bell curve, already climbing at their limit below 8a. I gave myself as an example as both 13 stone and 15 stone are healthy weights that I frequent, but if I ever climb 8a I don't think it will be at 15 stone.

People in this thread are appearing to take opposing views, but really there seems to be unanimous agreement that ED's are bad and should be prevented at all costs, particularly in young or impressionable climbers. I think the appearance of opposing views is largely due to 'diet' having become a dirty word that means different things to different people. Diet is not automatically good or bad. Some people will become healthier by dieting and some will become unhealthier.

[Stu Littlefair]

The problem with advocating diet but just "to a healthy weight" is that some people won't be able to stop there.

If you want to climb to your absolute performance limit, the way you'll get there is to train for years at a happy, healthy weight. And then, over a couple of months, temporarily reduce your weight to a level that is optimal for immediate performance.

The "trap" is that the immediate gain from weight loss is potentially addictive. This is manageable for some, but not at all for others. The trap makes reducing weight for performance a dangerous thing to do.

To avoid people falling in the trap, the climbing community needs to be honest both about the dangers of weight loss for climbing and also about it's benefits. If you're not honest about the ways and times that it can be effective, someone who has just seen their grade go up when they dropped 5lbs isn't going to listen to you when you tell them to go back to their normal weight for the rest of the year.

To add personal experience to this, I climbed for over 20 years and didn't ever consider my weight or think about dieting. I generally think of myself as a happy well-adjusted person with robust mental health. When I did lose weight to try and climb harder I was pretty shocked by how mentally tough it was to put the weight back on. It would have been very easy for me to fall into the weight loss trap.

[abarro81]

It doesn’t take much of a leap for your hypothetical impressionable young keener to be thinking that if they can currently hold a training edge with 5 or 6kg body weight offset with a pulley, then if they weighed 5 or 6kg less then they could hold it unassisted and be the toast of Instagram, even if the reality would be quite different.

Trouble is it isn’t likely to be different unless they lost some of that mass in their forearms or shoulder strength is the limiter.

Yeah, my fingerboard scores when cutting weight are almost exactly a reflection of weight lost. I.e. in those periods I chop X kgs off both sides of the pulley. This works well in the short term, but obviously disappears when you go back up, and in many ways you're left with nothing/little to show for much of the training you did while dieting. So doing it too hard, for too long, or too often is liable to be a risk to longer term progress.

but you can’t persuade someone that it’s in their long term interests to eat more if you deny that the weight loss helps at first, otherwise they’ll dismiss your opinion as obviously wrong.

Very much agree with this ^

[Edit: I crossed out a young sport climber in my original post because I think young people are particularly vunerable and should probably avoid weight loss strategies]

Yeah, I think it's easy to do it too often as well as for too long, so probably best to stay away from it when younger. If I've fucked up anywhere it's that - I think I can control the fluctuations quite well and my regaining of weight is not a mental challenge (interesting to hear that this is for you), though it is somewhat disordered (feast or famine, as you've commented before)... but if you told me I could only do it once every couple of years and not 2x per year I'd find that quite challenging mentally. Guess it goes to show there are a lot of slightly different ways for people with slightly different minds to get sucked into things.

[Stu Littlefair]

When I did lose weight to try and climb harder I was pretty shocked by how mentally tough it was to put the weight back on. It would have been very easy for me to fall into the weight loss trap.

p.s if you want an example of how the climbing community sometimes fucks up badly, I got quite a lot of ribbing when I posted beach pictures of me 6months later having put the weight back on (and then some). It was all meant - and taken - as light hearted and friendly banter, but in different circumstances...

[Oldmanmatt]

It doesn’t take much of a leap for your hypothetical impressionable young keener to be thinking that if they can currently hold a training edge with 5 or 6kg body weight offset with a pulley, then if they weighed 5 or 6kg less then they could hold it unassisted and be the toast of Instagram, even if the reality would be quite different.

Trouble is it isn’t likely to be different unless they lost some of that mass in their forearms or shoulder strength is the limiter.

Yeah, my fingerboard scores when cutting weight are almost exactly a reflection of weight lost. I.e. in those periods I chop X kgs off both sides of the pulley. This works well in the short term, but obviously disappears when you go back up, and in many ways you're left with nothing/little to show for much of the training you did while dieting. So doing it too hard, for too long, or too often is liable to be a risk to longer term progress.

but you can’t persuade someone that it’s in their long term interests to eat more if you deny that the weight loss helps at first, otherwise they’ll dismiss your opinion as obviously wrong.

Very much agree with this ^

[Edit: I crossed out a young sport climber in my original post because I think young people are particularly vunerable and should probably avoid weight loss strategies]

Yeah, I think it's easy to do it too often as well as for too long, so probably best to stay away from it when younger. If I've fucked up anywhere it's that - I think I can control the fluctuations quite well and my regaining of weight is not a mental challenge (interesting to hear that this is for you), though it is somewhat disordered (feast or famine, as you've commented before)... but if you told me I could only do it once every couple of years and not 2x per year I'd find that quite challenging mentally. Guess it goes to show there are a lot of slightly different ways for people with slightly different minds to get sucked into things.

I read this.

Then flicked over to FB (before going for my fifth run this week (on top of four board sessions and three gym sessions) and because I’m on a diet to shrug 5kg before spring and my “active” season (that will only take me down to 80kg)) and read this:

https://www.facebook.com/100044639040139/posts/248494763315157/


But it’s just occurred to me, that’s a ridiculous level of activity for a supposedly “lazy” period, I diet like that at least twice a year (for the last ten years) and come the “active” season, I’ll be switching from 6-7k runs with 25lbs to 15-25k with 35lbs, on top of climbing, diving, MTB, kayaking and ocean swimming several miles, each week.

That’s probably not particularly unusual for a UKB poster. The specific activities might change, but the overall, insane, level of drive, is common.

So, yes, as a community, we have an issue and even amongst our level, let alone the elite.
On the other hand, I suspect it’s broader than “just” eating disorders, that those are more a symptom of something that unites us all (regardless of gender) and that we are all susceptible/at risk of slipping into that category of behaviour.

You know, pushing your body beyond it’s capabilities, frequently injuring yourself, overtraining and indulging in high risk activities, primarily for “leisure” rather than “survival” or even “for material benefit”, seems quite a “disordered” behaviour, in itself...

Or so most of my relatives say.

[Teaboy]

Aren't we and the film conflating two different things here? Eating disorders as mental illness/ body dysmorphia etc. and some one dieting as one of a range of obsessive behaviours as a result of being obsessive about a sport. The film starts with Caroline talking about her experiences before she got into climbing and seemed to want to project them onto climbing i.e. I was super skinny because of mental health issues, body image etc., climbing is full of skinny people therefore they must have mental health and body image issues. In fact climbing (like any sport, especially at the top end) is full of people who do daft things to try and be better at it. Many of us will at times have given up jobs, fucked up relationships, education or other opportunities for climbing; this is closer to the extreme dieting we see in climbing than the issues Caroline experienced.

Similarly many of us will look back at times when we dedicated too much to climbing and realise it didn't make us as happy as we thought it would and the rewards for our sacrifice weren't worth it. It struck me that all the people in the film were dieting in the reasonable (at the time) belief that losing weight would enable them to climb harder. All of them talked about obsessively looking at the scales not in the mirror.

Obviously there are people in climbing with an eating disorder but are there examples of climbing causing long term eating disorders because of their obsession with weight? It seems most of the poster children for extreme dieting in the 90's grew up to be healthy 'normal' people. Likewise the people in the film seemed to have recovered by finding a better way to achieve their climbing goals (proviso, there is some hints that some of them got medical treatment but its difficult to know the extent, so I am assuming  bit here).

tl:dr climbing has an obsession problem not a body image eating disorder problem.

[Stu Littlefair]

Aren't we and the film conflating two different things here? Eating disorders as mental illness/ body dysmorphia etc. and some one 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.

[Andy F]

I once had an 8c+ climber say to me "if you can't be strong, be light". Now, having never been strong I went for the light.

I've dieted to achieve success. Looking back the success was great (for me) but at what cost? Not eating, skipping meals, constantly thinking hungry = being light = climbing harder. How much did that impact (my already fragile) mental health, not to mention the longer term physical impacts.

But, it was easy to get sucked in to that cycle. The short term gains feel sustainable, up to the point they're not. It was hard to break the pattern.

I'm still a crimp waif by most usual standards, but I'm no longer a skeletal waif. I understand how easy it is to go down that path.
When people say you look ill, it's time to take a look at yourself. I should have done sooner.

[petejh]

It doesn’t take much of a leap for your hypothetical impressionable young keener to be thinking that if they can currently hold a training edge with 5 or 6kg body weight offset with a pulley, then if they weighed 5 or 6kg less then they could hold it unassisted and be the toast of Instagram, even if the reality would be quite different.

I think there’s one of the  root causes right there. People wanting acknowledgment from instagram/social media. Cure that malady of the mind and it’s far easier to live with a healthy regard for your body and food, when you realise that you aren’t important and nobody who matters really gives a shit about how hard you climbed or how you look.

[MischaHY]

I've thought for some time about posting on this thread after getting so pissed off over on the UKC discussion.

However I'd like to share my experience as I think some here have got (understandably) blinkered vision.

I'm 173cm. 79-80KG depending on the day. Last year climbed 8b+ and 8A, and I'm alright in the scope of 'strong on an edge'.

Honestly, I've been given so much shit from within the climbing community about my body composition and weight.
This is something that started as criticism and 'helpful advice' when I initially got into climbing in 2013, and progressed to incredulity & backhanded praise as I made steady grade progress each year.

I constantly get comments from other climbers expressing their surprise that I can climb what I climb with the body composition I have.

"You don't look that strong", "Imagine how good you'd be if you lost 10kg!"

This has been a constant theme of my climbing experience. Honestly? It really fucks me off 

I tried dropping weight a few times entirely due to many peers strongly suggesting it would make me stronger. It didn't, it just made me weak and feel depressed for the first time in my life. The funniest thing is that a broken scale was what made it all clear to me - I'd been dutifully following a calorie restriction whilst training and was feeling pretty miserable but was pleased to see the number on the scale changing slowly, and I'd climbed my first 8a. 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.

However, after a little while I started to think - I'd just climbed my hardest route despite all that low energy and feeling rubbish and weak. What could I do when I didn't feel like that?

I started eating more, spoke with a nutritionist about how to make sure I was getting the right energy intake and protein etc, and climbed 4 more 8a's in a 6 week period after needing nearly the same amount of time to do my first.

Since then I'm eating well, trying as hard as I can to be a good climber, and telling people who make those comments about weight exactly what I think about it. I'm hoping to climb 8c this year - and if I do, it'll be at 79kg.

[Teaboy]

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.