Given the dire outcome of losing too much weight, it is confusing why girls keep drinking the dieting Kool-Aid. Part of it may be a lack of information about what really drives their successes. “When one of my athletes has a good performance, and I ask her to tell me what she did that contributed to the positive results, nine times out of 10, she doesn’t know,” said Dr. Caroline Silby, a sports psychologist and author of “Games Girls Play.” “If athletes don’t know why they’ve performed well, they also don’t understand why they perform poorly, and the easiest thing to blame for poor performance is weight.”
Also not helping: images of a sport’s elite athletes looking impossibly lean. “Paula Radcliffe does not have an ounce of body fat on her,” Sumpter said, referring to the British world-record holder for the marathon. These women may have perfectly healthy eating habits, but that doesn’t stop aspiring athletes from trying to attain the same appearance by less-healthy means. “The most important thing coaches and parents can do is to emphasize fitness,” Silby said. “If we can change the conversation from how thin these athletes are to how fit they are, it will go a long way to helping girls develop a healthier attitude toward food as fuel.”
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