How Diet Culture Quietly Shows Up in Sport
I approach this topic from a non-diet, weight-neutral perspective. I believe all bodies are worthy and all foods can have a place, and my recommendations are shaped by a person's genetics, family history, and their own relationship with food and body. That's the lens behind everything below.
Diet culture is a system of belief that equates thinness or a particular body shape with health and moral virtue, pushes weight loss and body reshaping as a path to higher status, labels certain foods as good or bad, and leaves out anyone who doesn't fit its narrow picture of what health looks like (Harrison, 2019). Most people can spot diet culture in a magazine or a wellness influencer's feed. It's harder to spot when it's woven into a coach's feedback or the everyday language of a training environment. That's exactly where it does the most damage.
The scale of the problem
Diet culture isn't a fringe issue. The global weight management industry was valued at roughly $143 billion in 2022 and is projected to nearly double by 2030 (Grand View Research, 2023). Survey data from 2022 found that close to half of Americans reported currently being on a diet, and a large majority said they'd dieted at some point in their life (Within Health, 2022).
Athletes carry a disproportionate share of the risk. A 2024 study spanning 27 countries found that roughly one in five athletes self-reported disordered eating (Ghazzawi et al., 2024). Depending on the study, prevalence estimates for disordered eating or a diagnosable eating disorder range up to 19% in male athletes and as high as 45% in female athletes (Bratland-Sanda & Sundgot-Borgen, 2013; Wells et al., 2020).
Why sport increases the risk
Being an athlete doesn't cause an eating disorder on its own, but it adds risk on top of the factors that affect anyone: low self-esteem, perfectionism, sensitivity to others' judgment, performance anxiety, genetic predisposition, a personal or family history of disordered eating, chronic dieting, trauma history, and cultural or media pressure to be thin (Bennett, 2022; National Eating Disorders Association, n.d.; Puscheck et al., 2025). Sport adds its own layer: performance pressure, a training environment that can reinforce chronic dieting, and a culture where pushing through discomfort is often treated as a virtue rather than a warning sign.
How diet culture quietly becomes normal in sport
None of this usually shows up as something dramatic. It shows up in small, repeated moments that start to feel like just "how things are done."
Labeling food as good or bad. An athlete gets told certain carbs are fine but others aren't, or gets a comment implying that someone studying kinesiology shouldn't be eating white bread. The specific food changes; the underlying message doesn't.
Misunderstanding what "enough" actually means. An athlete eating three meals a day can still be significantly underfueling relative to their training demands. Meal frequency isn't the same as adequacy, but it's often treated as if it is.
Being told to fuel appropriately while also staying under a certain number. This is one of the more damaging contradictions athletes hear, especially during weight restoration: encouragement to eat enough, paired with an unspoken (or spoken) ceiling that undercuts the whole goal.
Only valuing food for what it does physically. One athlete in a published study described forgetting that people who don't train still need to eat, as if food only counts as necessary when it's fueling performance (Bentley et al., 2021).
Skipping meals or "saving up" calories for later. There's research suggesting that even a same-day energy deficit as small as 300 calories, roughly what the liver can store as glycogen, is associated with higher cortisol, higher catabolism, lower estradiol, and a lower resting metabolic rate (Fahrenholtz et al., 2018). This isn't a small or harmless habit.
Fixating on body weight or body fat percentage. One athlete recalled a coach telling her that every pound gained would cost her a millisecond in competition (Thibodeau et al., 2025). Meanwhile, the research on body composition and performance is far less conclusive than that kind of comment implies — factors like experience in sport, training hours, and competition exposure matter as much or more (Mathisen et al., 2023).
Clinicians competing with social media. Misinformation trends fast and travels further than most evidence-based guidance ever will.
Valuing performance over health. This is the throughline connecting everything above. Research describes how what often starts as a reasonable attempt to reach a body composition suited to a sport can quietly progress into chronic extreme dieting, and from there into a diagnosable eating disorder (Sundgot-Borgen & Torstveit, 2010).
A few questions worth asking
If you're a coach, clinician, or parent around athletes, a few honest questions can go a long way before making a nutrition-related comment or recommendation:
Am I making this recommendation because it's actually evidence-based, or because diet culture told me it's the right one?
What biopsychosocial factors might be at play here that have nothing to do with food itself?
Is this body composition target genetically realistic for this athlete, or only achievable through restriction?
Would a change in body composition actually change performance outcomes, or are there other things worth targeting instead?
Encouraging a flexible, more intuitive meal structure, resisting the urge to put any one food on a pedestal, and allowing real variety in what athletes eat, yes, including foods that get unfairly demonized, isn't in conflict with performance. It's often what protects it.
Further reading
Sick Enough by Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani
Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith
Treating Athletes With Eating Disorders by Dr. Kate Bennett
Finding Your Sweet Spot: How to Avoid RED-S by Rebecca McConville, MS, RDN, LD, CSSD, CEDS
Good For A Girl by Lauren Fleshman
Up to Speed by Christine Yu
The RED-S YouTube channel from Tina Muir (Running For Real)
References
Bennett, K. (2022). Treating Athletes with Eating Disorders: Bridging the Gap between Sport and Clinical Worlds. Routledge.
Bentley, M. R. N., Patterson, L. B., Mitchell, N., & Backhouse, S. H. (2021). Athlete perspectives on the enablers and barriers to nutritional adherence in high-performance sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 52, 101831. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2020.101831
Bratland-Sanda, S., & Sundgot-Borgen, J. (2013). Eating disorders in athletes: Overview of prevalence, risk factors and recommendations for prevention and treatment. European Journal of Sport Science, 13(5), 499-508. https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2012.740504
Fahrenholtz, I., et al. (2018). Within-day energy deficiency and reproductive function in female endurance athletes. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
Ghazzawi, H. A., Nimer, L. S., Haddad, A. J., et al. (2024). A systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression of the prevalence of self-reported disordered eating and associated factors among athletes worldwide. Journal of Eating Disorders, 12(1), 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-024-00982-5
Grand View Research. (2023, June). Weight Management Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/weight-management-market
Harrison, C. (2019). Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating. Little, Brown Spark.
Mathisen, T. F., et al. (2023). Best practice recommendations for body composition considerations in sport to reduce health and performance risks. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(17), 1148-1160. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2023-106812
National Eating Disorders Association. (n.d.). Coach & Trainer Toolkit.
Puscheck, L. J., Kennel, J., & Saenz, C. (2025). Evaluating the prevalence of eating disorder risk and low energy availability risk in collegiate athletes. Journal of Eating Disorders, 13(1), 53. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-025-01218-w
Sundgot-Borgen, J., & Torstveit, M. K. (2010). Aspects of disordered eating continuum in elite high-intensity sports. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 20(Suppl 2), 112-121. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2010.01190.x
Thibodeau, D. E., Sutherland, S., Brown, D. M., Quesnel, D. A., & Sabiston, C. M. (2025). Coaches say lighter is better, but at what cost? Qualitative Health Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323251331800
Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020). Intuitive Eating (4th ed.). St. Martin's Essentials.
Wells, K. R., Jeacocke, N. A., Appaneal, R., et al. (2020). The AIS and NEDC position statement on disordered eating in high performance sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 54(21), 1247. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2019-101813
Within Health. (2022, October 27). Study Reveals Americans' Dieting Habits in 2022. https://withinhealth.com/explore-articles/study-reveals-americans-dieting-habits-in-2022
If you're a coach, athlete, or parent navigating any of this, you don't have to figure it out alone. Book a consultation or learn more about working together.
