Football Australia’s shocking disordered eating culture and how they are trying to combat it

Disordered eating habits. Body image issues. Obsession with weight at the cost of athletic performance. Inside the shocking body dysmorphia culture in Australian Football.

Disordered eating habits. Body image issues. Obsession with weight and calories at the cost of athletic performance. A culture of poor relationships with food.

Compeat Performance co-founder and dietitian Alicia Edge anticipated such hurdles when she was first contracted to work with the Matildas in 2019, but the extent to which it permeated not just the first team but also the lower representative tiers was a shock.

“I was really shocked at the state of football – and this isn’t just the Matildas – of where it was at. It had some really big body image and disordered eating behaviours across it,” Edge told News Corp.

“When I first accepted the contract (in 2019) I thought, ‘I’m really excited to meet these footballers, they’re going to be so strong, powerful and confident and all about performance’. But I was really coming in from a different angle.

“There were really high rates of disordered eating and body image issues and it became a really (important) part of my role, because I couldn’t achieve high performance until the underlying things that were preventing performance were recovered.”

Edge explained football as a sport had a culture heavily aligned with body composition, which lead to an obsession with how players looked that could and often would come at a detriment to their performance.

These behaviours were, often unknowingly, cultivated in the football sphere where teammates, coaches and support staff at professional clubs subscribed to the idea that to play a certain way meant looking a certain way.

“There’s an assumption you can predict a player’s potential to perform or their professionalism based on what they look like and that just isn’t the case, but it proliferates this belief around what someone should do to be successful,” Edge said.

“The more I speak to coaches and support staff, it’s even more important to work through their assumptions around food and body because if we’re going to change a culture, we need to change the environment they’re in.”

When she sat players down, Edge found that very rarely was body composition what drove them to succeed.

“One activity we often get players to do is define their why – everything that we’re working towards in terms of who they want to be as a player and person,” she said.

“When we talk about that it’s very rare someone will say, ‘I want to have a six-pack’ or, ‘Be a person who is such and such kilos’.

“A very big risk of putting a body composition goal in front of a player is that we could achieve that goal, but it could be at the cost of performance. So if we always place performance and the person first and focus on speed, agility, strength, power … that’s the really important part.

“It’s not saying we can’t have a body composition goal, but very rarely is it actually attached to a direct performance measure.”

Prioritising performance may sound obvious but at the elite level, where skin fold tests and DEXA scans are commonplace at international clubs, it creates a physical and emotional hurdle that can be challenging for athletes.

Edge said the fear of not hitting the predetermined measures for athletic performance in such tests often drove athletes to take drastic approaches with their diets.

That belief was then confirmed by teammates, and the pressures to look a certain way, by society’s social media standards of what an athlete was meant to look like, often compounded the problem.

“Some of the Matildas that have been through this, one of the biggest things they will find is, ‘Wow, I didn’t realise how much space (food) was taking up in my mind and how it was impacting my day-to-day … on the football pitch and outside of football as well’,” she said.

Edge quickly realised information sessions weren’t cutting the mustard, because players and staff had grown up in an environment – and lived in a social media world – where information was varied and constant.

It wasn’t only about educating players on the finer aspects of diet but also moving away from using scales and traditional body measurements such as skin fold tests as a measure for success or failure.

It’s why the Matildas programs no longer track body composition metrics.

“It’s all performance driven than number driven. We didn’t accidentally remove body composition, but we were getting measures that didn’t mean anything because we simply weren’t using that data,” Edge explained.

“(Conversations with athletes are) no longer, ‘Hey Alicia I’ve noticed my DEXA scans have gone up 2kg’, it’s now, ‘Hey Alicia, I’ve felt like this’, or, ‘I’d like to achieve this’.

“That education around what players should look for in terms of challenges with body image or relationships with food (is crucial).

“They’ve noticed that change and what to look for and also who to turn to when they noticed and for me that’s an absolute success of the program so far.”

Edge’s role has now extended to working with not just the Senior Matildas, but the Future, Young and Junior Matildas programs as well.

Combating the obsessive body composition culture has helped limit the number of “spot fires” that may pop up, and athletes are more aware of the warning signs associated with disordered eating. So-too are the coaches and staff.

“It’s really the first time I’ve felt that even the coaching team (is on board),” Edge said.

“They will call me (and say), ‘Hey Alicia, I would love this player to achieve this, but I don’t want to say anything that might trigger them or be risky, can you tell me how to have that conversation’ - that’s the first time I’ve seen that in sport.

“There’s a really collaborative approach at the Matildas to allow for this. We all want to achieve the same thing … it’s been a really big play over the last few years and so exciting to see where it’s at now.”

But the program is not without its hurdles.

As a national representative team, players spend most of their time at clubs spread across Europe, the UK and US. Each club takes a vastly different approach to nutrition and can be in direct conflict with what Edge is trying to instil at the Matildas.

“It’s probably one of our biggest challenges,” she said.

“We cannot control every aspect of a team or sporting environment. There’s so much out of our control. (But) we can control parts of that, and it’s about teaching (the players) that resilience of decision making when it comes to food.”

Edge says there will never be a perfect world where athletes don’t struggle with body image and their relationship with food. But there can be a system in place to recognise the early warning signs and stop it becoming a major problem.

“I would love to see us get to a stage in sport where we accept everyone is on a continuum of their relationship with food and body and we shouldn’t expect it to stay the same or positive, but we get to the point where it’s a safe environment so we can eliminate the eating disorder piece of this,” Edge said.

“If the support team and environment the players are in has a really high self-awareness and care for the person, I really believe we can get to a point where we eliminate eating disorders in sport.

“I know that’s a really big goal and kind of pie in the sky, but with a safe environment and change in culture I believe that’s something we can do.”

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