Katie’s Story

Turning to sport to overcome binge eating and poor self-esteem

My relationship with fitness, sport and mental health has been a complex, long journey. If there’s one thing I have learned from it is that sport can be your greatest tool or your greatest trigger when it comes to disordered eating, mental health and issues with self-esteem. I was only in Year 9 when I started self-harming, and it was around the same time that I started restricting myself to a couple hundred calories a day, which was the start to the binge-restrict cycle that I continue to struggle with even now. When I joined cross-country in highschool and began to enjoy running, I quickly discovered how good exercise could make you feel, but equally how good it feels to have people praise you for losing weight, and it was both of these factors that pushed me to run more and more.

It wasn’t until university that I came across the idea of wanting to be strong. I noticed that my brother was starting to become serious with his powerlifting training, and upon coming across social media accounts of female powerlifters and weightlifters, a paradigm shift started in my head – I too wanted to be strong, and most importantly I wanted to love my body more for what it could do and not what it looked like. I won’t lie and say that was an overnight change. In fact, three years down the line I am only just feeling as though I’ve made significant progress in my mindset.

I then joined the Women’s Rugby team in my second year of uni, inspired by other girls I had met and keen to push myself out of my comfort zone and build confidence. Playing a team sport truly helped me feel less alone, feel well supported and did wonders for my self-image. It wasn’t about how you looked, or how much you weighed, it was about how hard you worked for the girls playing alongside you. However, I cannot deny that the constant pressure of performing also eroded at my self-esteem at certain times. I cannot deny that I never felt bad after comparing myself to the other girls – girls that were stronger, leaner, or faster.

Here is where it clicked for me that if you do not pursue sport or fitness with the right mindset, it can easily damage, rather than support your mental health. You cannot jump into it hoping for it to be a magic fix for your underlying problems with self-esteem or body image unless you simultaneously work to fix them yourself. Joining rugby may have helped me initially, but it was only a shift in mindset that allowed it to continue doing so. Equally, being introduced to the world of strength training may have jumpstarted my appreciation of my body for what it could do, but I had to learn to stop comparing myself to the endless Instagram accounts of skinny, lean fitness models first.

While self-harm, low self-esteem and binging/restricting have continued to be a struggle, even now, I am so proud of how much my mindset has improved from that of the teenage me years ago, and involving myself in different sports has been a huge part of that.