High performance athletes are competitive people all the time, even when food is in sight. They take care of their diet to make it an ally of performance, but when it becomes one more rival, it can become an eating disorder that manifests itself in various ways.
The Mexican pentathlete Tamara Vega, who is retiring at the next Olympic Games in Paris 2024, after almost 15 years as a national team, puts the issue on the table. Based on her own experience after overcoming eating disorders, she calls on Mexican athletes to self-examine, seek advice and start treatment if they identify that they have an eating problem. In principle, detection is not easy and behavior patterns can be hidden by athletes for more than six months, which is, on average, the minimum time in which alarms should be set off to monitor nutrition under the analysis of psychology. .
“An athlete is like another species, he is competing all day, from dawn to dusk. For this reason, there are nutritionists specialized in high-performance athletes, our system works differently. Eating disorders are quite serious, I visualized a small part of my environment during my career, but behind each athlete there is a world, it can be depression, anxiety, and other things, many unprotected athletes who do not know who to approach ”.
Tamara Vega’s initiative arose when she uploaded a photo of herself to her social networks. She, saddened by her “physical defects”, wrote about the psychological and nutritional effects that caused her not to have the “perfect body” that athletes “should”. The comments began to fall with empathy and with the need to talk about the subject. This 2023 launched the Tamara Vega Foundation and in a documentary “Athletes in front of the mirror #Amatureflejo” interviewed the following athletes: Annel Tapia (basketball), Ana Torres Wong (weightlifting), Alejandra Bonilla (wrestling), Jessica Bonilla (cycling), Alejandra García (boxing), Paulina Suárez (nutritionist), Adriana Jiménez (diving), Gabriela Huerta (rowing) and Cynthia Quesada (gymnastics).
“Since the launch of the Foundation, every day we receive at least one message from a woman; of men, it is very little, I feel that it is more difficult for them to accept these problems. We interview athletes of weights, wrestling, gymnastics and appreciation sports, especially aquatics, they experience torment, it is a higher index”, the pentathlete emphasizes.
Tamara says that she is focused on getting the ticket to the Paris Olympics, and that the Foundation is in its launch stage, because when she retires as an athlete, the focus will be to grow it more. She currently teams up with three specialists: nutritionist, psychologist, psychiatrist. Later, she would add doctors, physical therapists, coaching, cooking courses (so that athletes know options) and holistic courses such as meditation.
“For the initial capital, wanting to set up a clinic for the Foundation and get the material, more than 3 million are needed, but for the vision we have we would need more. It is the first time of a project of this nature, I had not heard of another, although it was a subject that among athletes we knew. Neither in another country, although I know that it is a taboo in the world, in Mexico more and they do not take action on the matter.
Paulina Suárez, a sports nutritionist with a diploma in eating disorders, is a participant in the project at the Foundation. In a conversation also with this medium, he defines that an eating disorder: “is classified as a mental issue and it begins to be noticed when the symptoms are evident. No one in the environment can even realize the pathological behaviors that are legitimized and normalized. Athletes They are a risk group due to the demands of their activity.
“Denial and anger are some of the main signs that the athlete does not accept that they have a problem, sees it as normal, or says that the coach asked them to. They look for ways to behave like this without others meddling. A person “He doesn’t want to treat himself, he won’t do it, until he hits rock bottom. It’s difficult for a disorder to be treated early, there are some that already have an average of up to 5 or 10 years,” explains the nutritionist.
