Although endurance sports welcome all body shapes and sizes and training approaches, many athletes accidentally fall into the mindset that to be successful, an extreme style of eating and a rigorous training plan is necessary This begs the question "is training for an athletic event just a socially acceptable way to disguise an obsession with exercise and disordered eating habits?"
Even if you are not obsessed with training miles, body image or the marginal gain approach, it's still rather easy to become extreme with your choices when training for an endurance event - especially if you are following the journey of another athlete. There are many athletes who have been forced away from the sport due to injury or health issue (mental or physical), only to spend years trying to put together all of the broken pieces that occurred from a body that was damaged by extreme choices - such as restrictive eating and overtraining.
Endurance sports often attract a specific personality type - driven, hard-working, competitive, perfectionist, type-A, etc. It's not uncommon for individuals with underlying eating, body image and obsessive-compulsive behaviors to enter the world of endurance sports - only to realize that these issues are exacerbated when training gets more serious. Behind the hidden lens of social media, it's difficult to know if a driven, dedicated and hard-working individual - who is sharing his/her tips, giving advice or sharing his/her personal journey - could be a person who has a very unhealthy relationship with food, exercise and the body.
With so much misinformation circulating over the web, via word of mouth, on YouTube and on social media, often given by inexperienced, unskilled and qualified "experts," I caution you to not believe everything that you see, read or hear. Athletes and experts are not always transparent and this can have a detrimental effect on you, the "follower" or "client." Social media provides a very skewed reality.
And this isn't limited to athletes. Coaches are also to blame. Inadvertently, a coach may reference weight as a limiter to performance, suggesting that a way to improve health, performance or body composition is to weigh daily, cut out certain food groups and avoid carbohydrates at certain times of the day. The coach may then blame athletes for lack of progress or compliance if results are not achieved. Instead of flexibility and freedom, your life becomes an obsession of food, numbers, results and data.