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Eating disorders and related weight control behaviors, such as excessive exercising and restrictive eating, represent serious health problems for girls and women in the United States and other industrialized nations. Female athletes, in particular, have been identified as a subgroup to study because of the unique weight, performance, and body image pressures they experience from coaches, teammates, fans, and judges. Such "sport-environment" pressures, when combined with general societal messages about the need to be thin and attractive, are thought to substantially increase female athletes' risk of developing disordered eating problems. To date, only a few eating disorder studies included sufficiently large samples of single at-risk sports, so little is known about the extent to which athletes in these sports use pathogenic weight control behaviors and experience clinical and subclinical eating disorders. Thus, the purpose of this study was to survey a geographically diverse group of female collegiate athletes from two at-risk sports--swimming/diving and gymnastics. In doing so, the authors first wanted to examine the prevalence of clinical and subclinical disorders. Second, because relatively few athletes exhibit sufficient number and severity of symptoms to be classified as subclinical or clinical in their eating behaviors, the authors also wanted to determine the extent to which they engaged in pathogenic eating (e.g., binging) and weight control (e.g., excessive exercising, vomiting, dieting) behaviors. The authors selected these behaviors because they are individual symptoms of disordered eating and may be precursors to the development of subclinical or clinical disorders. (Contains 1 table.)

Female athletes have been identified as a subpopulation at heightened risk for disordered eating attitudes and behaviors, particularly due to weight pressures in their environment. Using a sample of 414 NCAA Division-I female collegiate athletes, we examined the relations of required team weigh-ins or self-weighing on disordered eating attitudes and behaviors. Through a series of multivariate analyses, we determined that team weighs were unrelated significantly to all outcome measures. Self-weighing, however, differentiated the athletes' scores on internalization, body satisfaction, dietary restraint, negative affect, and bulimic symptomatology; athletes who self-weighed three or more times a week (sometimes 1-2 times per week) reported significantly higher levels of pathology across all measures. Mandatory team-conducted weigh-ins appear to not be a salient pressure for female gymnasts and swimmer/divers, although the frequency of their self-weighing may represent a level of self-monitoring that is associated with greater endorsement of disordered eating attitudes and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we tested Petrie and Greenleaf's (2007) model of bulimic symptoms in two independent samples of female collegiate swimmers/divers and gymnasts. Structural equation modeling revealed support for the model, although it also suggested additional pathways. Specifically, general societal pressures regarding weight and body were related to the internalization of those ideals and, subsequently, to increases in body dissatisfaction. Pressures from the sport environment regarding weight and appearance were associated with more body dissatisfaction and more restrictive eating. Body dissatisfaction was related to more feelings of sadness, anger, and fear among the athletes. Negative affect, body dissatisfaction, and dietary restraint were related directly to bulimic symptoms, accounting for 55-58% of its variance. These results suggest that general sociocultural pressures are influential, but weight and appearance pressures in the sport environment may be even more pervasive and negative for female athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]