Eating Disorder Therapy For Athletes
Eating Disorders and Athletes
Athletes face unique pressures around performance, training, and body image that can complicate recovery from eating disorders or disordered eating. I work with athletes to support both mental health and athletic goals, whether you want to continue your sport or are navigating retirement from competition.
Eating disorder treatment for athletes goes beyond food — it also addresses your relationship to your body, sport, and identity. Early in recovery, athletes may be asked to adjust or pause training to allow their bodies to heal. Therapy can help you process the emotional impact of these changes and maintain a sense of self during this time.
With the right support, your sport can remain a positive part of your life and recovery. I approach recovery like treating an injury: it requires care, patience, and collaboration with your team to ensure a healthy return to performance.
Signs of disordered eating in athletes:
Overtraining or training while injured
Obsessive rituals around food
Rigidity in food intake (quantity, timing, rules)
Excessive focus on training data, schedules, or workouts
Irritable moods or emotional changes
Over-Exercising in Athletes
Over-exercising is often normalized in sports, making it hard to recognize. Common patterns include:
Linking exercise to “earning” food
Prioritizing exercise over relationships or responsibilities
Using exercise as the primary outlet for emotions
Rigid or excessive workout routines outside of competition
Through therapy, we work to reframe exercise, helping you enjoy movement without compulsion and build healthier habits that support both recovery and performance.
Stephanie understands the specific needs that athletes have when they look to recover from eating disorders or disordered eating. She is here to support your individual needs whether you are looking to continue your sport or need help with the retirement process. Eating disorder treatment for athletes focuses on not just our relationship to food, but our relationship to sport and our bodies. Sometimes in early treatment an athlete is forced to stop training and/or competing in order for their bodies to heal. This can be a challenging time for some and the support of a therapist is often helpful. Therapy can help support your emotional needs while recognizing the loss (temporary or not) with your sport and parts of your identity.
It is her belief as a provider that your sport can be part of your eating disorder recovery with the right support in place. For athletes, we can think of eating disorders as an injury. It is helpful to have a mental health provider who is aware of the culture of sport; who can work with you and your team to help you get back on track. As with all injuries, healing is needed and not always linear and she is available to support your mental health concerns during that journey.
Some of the signs to look for in athletes who are struggling with disordered eating:
Overtraining
Obsessive rituals around food
Rigidity in food intake (quantity, time, rules)
Continuing to train or crossgrain when injured
recurrent injuries
Obsessing about training data, details, schedules,
Adding workouts to training schedule
Irritable moods
About Over Exercising
While overexercising isn’t considered an eating disorder itself it can become a compulsion that is similar to patterns of bulimia. Over exercising isn’t always linked to an eating disorder, but it is usually connected to how one feels about their body overall. Sometimes over exercise can be hard to identify as it is normalized and praised in our society. Some key signs to look for are:
Linking food to exercise
The “earn it or burn it” mentality.
Prioritizing exercise over other areas of life to the detriment of those other areas
The need to exercise taking away from ones ability to tolerate their emotions
Using exercise as their only emotional outlet
Rigid ideas about exercise and food
Multiple workouts in one day when not competing in athletic events or multi-sport events.
Are you ready to work on changing your relationship to food, your body, and your sport?