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“This shit is old news” I heard someone complaining while running through the Arsenal at Rifle Mountain Park. “Every other girl these days seems to have the same story. They are not special.
I slowed down a bit. My partner was waiting, watching me expectantly from the other side of the boulder as he finished his knot, but it seemed like the wait was worth it. It didn’t take long to piece together the story: the “girl” in question had just shared her decision to check into an eating disorder treatment center.
I didn’t recognize this guy as a regular. Lucky for him, I thought. If it was, he would have broken a new one for her.
But, in a sense, he was right. I have also noticed that the topic comes up more and more often. But none of these eating disorder stories is less valuable for echoing the ones that came before. If anything, each additional one I hear makes everyone hit even harder.
The climbing community shares a kind of traumatic bond. Ever since the days of lycra leggings and cat food cans at Camp 4, climbers have clung to a flawed logic: the lighter you are, the stronger you climb. I don’t blame anyone for believing it. Countless well-intentioned climbers, including myself, fall into that trap without a second thought because…it works.
For a while, that is. Eventually, the high wears off, your body running out of resources and your muscles wasting away until there’s nothing left but an ashen face contorted in confusion about why even warming up suddenly feels impossible. And that’s just the least of the negative side effects.
The glamorous side of climbing weight loss has been celebrated loudly for decades. Consequences, on the other hand, have been the dirty little secret of the sport for just as long. Recently, the dialogue began to shift away from the supposed benefits of shrinking your body at all costs to the harsh reality of living with an eating disorder.
[Related: Coming Up For Air: When Climbing Isn’t The Only Battle]
In the last year alone, I’ve noticed a distinct change in the way climbers around me talk about food. Arguments over lettuce cups and pride in hunger pangs used to echo off the rock faces on a regular basis, provoking an uncomfortable mix of frustration and envy in me. Harsh experience made sure it tasted better, but the charm remained. I kept my guard up whenever I encountered unfamiliar faces because I didn’t trust the natural flow of conversation between the climbers. It always seemed to lead back to the same themes: body fat percentages, eating patterns, and which gluttonous indulgence was at the top of that week’s naughty list. In retrospect, it makes sense. Hungry minds can’t focus on much else.
But this summer, in my local club, something changed. I’ve heard less talk about downshifting and more about fueling up. The talk about food focused more on how Many snacks a climber could fit in their backpack instead of how many they had brought and how much better they felt after closing a sandwich instead of how many hours they had subsisted on nothing more than half an apple. The climbers around me were no longer waxing poetic about the restriction; instead, they seemed angry at his earlier drive for a smaller body. It was a hopeful sign of a larger changing narrative.
New research from the Journal of Eating Disorders backs this up. A qualitative study on rock climbing chat forums shows a difference in the way contemporary climbers talk about eating disorders, body image concerns and sustainable athleticism compared to the early 2000s. Where People used to seek bad advice on how to eat less and ship more, now they’re working to combat those temptations while advocating for more size diversity in the sport.
Neely Quinn, a certified integrative clinical nutrition therapist who specializes in nutrition for climbers, has noticed a similar trend. “There has definitely been an increase in my clients’ level of awareness over the last year or so about disordered eating behaviors and their health consequences,” she says. “It’s exciting to have clients talk so openly about everything and to see so many of them get to a place where they are ready to start their recovery. I am also noticing much more body acceptance among all of my clients, whereas even a few years ago most of the people I worked with had an urgent desire to lose weight. Now they come to me clearly having done a lot of thinking about their body, speaking fluently about their thoughts and feelings about weight, body dysmorphia, and the health consequences of calorie restriction. They want help to start eating in a more sustainable and nutritious way, and that seems incredible to me.”
Climbing coach Alex Stiger experienced her own nutritional transformation thanks to a single enlightening conversation, one that might not have happened a few years ago when these topics were more taboo. “My friend talking to me about my habits really made me feel like I was cared for,” she says. “A little angry too, at the time, but most importantly, aware. With that awareness I was able to gain insight into what and how much he was eating, and realized that he was regularly in deficit during my performance days. From there, I was able to make the changes I needed to feel so much better.”
The point of all this is not to say that the problem is solved. Some would think so, like that calloused stranger I overheard at Arsenal. On the contrary, the talks are working, slowly but surely.
Many of us saying the same thing is the only reason many of us are no longer suffering in silence. These repetitive conversations are not a beating; they are a sign that the climbing community is finally acknowledging the damage. Its prevalence means that we now have the opportunity to unearth this dirty little secret in its entirety, once and for all.
So I want to hear more of the same. I want to hear all the gory details about how skipping breakfast made you so dizzy you couldn’t even complete focus, let alone finish your project. I want to hear how cutting carbs made you skip training and nap all day. I want to hear about the series of injuries that kept you from even touching a rock for months. I want to hear all the pain, disappointment, and bitterness that chasing smallness at all costs has brought you. There has been so much glorification of these things for so long that the only way to fight back is with an onslaught of the opposite. We have to make our suffering so clear that no young climber wants to walk the same path ever again, for the sake of his climb or his general well-being.
For now, the truth has not yet reached all ears. “I’ve worked with an alarming number of teenage girls whose main goal is to climb stronger by any means necessary,” Quinn explains, “including starving themselves until they’re hospitalized. I’ve heard clients of all ages say something like: ‘I don’t look like the girls on the World Cup podiums and I think it’s holding me back from climbing.’
But what if that wasn’t your default belief? What if they had heard so many horror stories about climbers’ lives coming to a standstill at best and coming to a complete halt at worst that the idea of manipulating their weight never even occurred to them. a fast track to improvement?
Until then, there is no such thing as too much information in this field. Climbers, keep talking about your eating disorders. The more we know of the ugly truth, the better.
