Mental Health Awareness Month: Choosing Recovery For Ourselves
- May 11
- 11 min read
For those who don’t have the privilege of knowing Ella personally, let me introduce her with a few words: loving, genuine, ambitious, empathetic, and hardworking. I have been blessed to have her as both a teammate and a close personal friend.
Over the past several years, Ella has spoken openly about her experience with an eating disorder and how she reclaimed her life by choosing recovery. She has served as a wonderful advocate for individuals who are struggling with eating disorders or other mental health diagnoses. She discusses her journey and shares support for recovery on her blog, tomyfirstlove.com; her podcast, The Un-Fun Friends; and her personal social media accounts. Ella is currently pursuing an education in clinical psychology at Samford University, and hopes to someday work with patients in eating disorder recovery.
In honor of Mental Health Awareness month, I wanted to sit down with Ella and discuss the intersection between competitive athletics, mental health, and eating disorders. As a personal coach and distance runner myself, it breaks my heart to know that these experiences are not uncommon amongst female athletes: some studies suggest that as many as 45% of female athletes will either struggle with disordered eating or an eating disorder [1].
It is my hope that the following conversation will enact change on both the individual and systemic level within youth sports. For those who are currently struggling with mental health - we see you, we hear you, and we are cheering for your journey in recovery. For those who have felt like something is wrong, but are too scared to reach out for help or don’t know where to start, I implore you to explore the resources provided at the end of this article. And finally, I hope that this conversation sheds light on the harm often perpetuated by leaders in youth sports and supports a broader cultural change in sports coaching.
Content warning: eating disorders, restrictive eating patterns, and body shaming.
S: Which sports did you play growing up, and when did you get introduced to running?
E: So I started playing soccer at 4, but it wasn’t until I was in elementary school that I got introduced to track through the YMCA. At that point, I was doing soccer, basketball, track, volleyball… I literally did all of it.
In middle school, I was still doing club soccer competitively and I also did all the school sports: basketball, track, and volleyball. With soccer, I never felt confident. I felt like a baby giraffe trying to stand up for the first time… I don’t really know how to describe it. Just very out of place. I was just so insecure and not confident in myself.
I would say middle school was when I really fell in love with track. I also loved it at the YMCA, but middle school was when I started running the 400 and the 4x4, which are my favorite events.
Right before our preseason started for high school basketball, I hurt my ankle in a soccer tournament. It was a grade III tear in every single ligament in my ankle. It was brutal, and I was so mad that it took me out of basketball. At that point, I knew I was done with soccer and started focusing on basketball and track.
S: How did your background as a multi-sport athlete impact your relationship with track and field?
E: I was definitely just a more well-rounded athlete because it felt like cross training. Track was helping me with soccer and basketball, and vice versa. I feel like soccer and basketball really helped my endurance with track.
S: I’m really curious about your comment on soccer…feeling out of place, feeling like a baby giraffe. Looking back, can you pinpoint a specific reason why you felt that way? Do you think it was some aspect of the game itself?
E: So yeah, I had some really intense coaches at that age. I had two coaches for club soccer that were quite frankly verbally abusive. I felt like I was never enough, no matter how hard I worked or how hard I tried. The stress and the anxiety, even just driving to practice, was debilitating and there was no joy in it anymore. There was this constant feeling of I’m never going to be good at this because external voices were feeding into me.
I feel like my temperament, too, is just a high-strung, anxious person that wants to succeed and do well. I’m already so hard on myself that I don’t need to hear it from someone else.
S: Something I really admire about you is how open you’ve been with your mental health journey and the advocacy work you do. Would you mind sharing about how competitive athletics impacted your mental health? Do you think your mental health struggles stemmed from an internal place, an external place (social media, coaches, etc.), or a combination of both? You can talk about things that happened earlier than high school - go as far back as you feel is relevant or needed.
E: I used to swim competitively, and my first vivid memory of being really aware of my body was on the swim team. I was in a swimsuit, feeling physically uncomfortable and comparing myself to other girls on the team - that’s definitely when the body awareness started.
In elementary school, I was bullied for the way I looked and what I was eating. It was at a young age when the eating disorder thoughts and behaviors started to happen. I was always taller and more physically mature than most girls at that age. So in elementary and middle school, I felt like an outsider.
In 7th and 8th grade, I started excelling in school sports and the attention flipped. I didn't feel like an outsider anymore. I guess I learned at that point that… being “good enough” came from how well I performed. In order to be loved or be included, I felt like I had to perform well.
Going into high school, I made varsity basketball as a freshman and was doing really well with that. After basketball season ended, the same thing happened with track. I think the eating disorder really took off that year… I began to think restricting and controlling food was the reason why I performed so well.
At track regionals my freshman year, I placed 3rd and received the wild card to go to the state meet. It was so fun, all my teammates were so excited for me. But I’ll never forget, while I was walking back to our team tent, this guy came up to me and gave me his business card. He did personal training on the side. I can remember him saying that I had really good potential. That word didn’t sit well in my brain. But what really didn’t land was him saying that he would help me with my physique - that was the word he used. And that if ‘I got any bigger, I wasn’t going to be able to race as well’.
Then, when I raced at state, I placed 6th. Looking back, placing 6th at the state meet as a freshman was a huge accomplishment. But at the time, I felt like it was a horrible race. I wanted to do better. I remember walking back to the football field after the race to cool down and thinking I have to be smaller.
I really spiraled. I started working with these personal coaches outside of school - which I thought would be great, but the messages I was hearing from them were really hurtful. They would make comments if I tried to talk to them about my eating disorder, saying things like “at least you’re not overweight” or would set food rules for me.
I would show up for training, and they would ask “what have you eaten since I last saw you?” Or they would make statements about other women's bodies, saying things like “I’m going to train you so you don’t look like that”. Looking back, we were high school-, middle school-, and younger-aged girls… these rules and comments they were making were just insane.
That fall, my school basketball coach had begun picking up on some of my eating disorder behaviors. I brushed it off at first, told her it wasn’t a big deal. She gave me a week to talk to my parents, but if I didn’t, she was going to talk to them. She ultimately told my parents what was going on, and I started therapy, but pretty quickly I learned how to be the “perfect patient”... walking the line of telling them just enough to make sure that sports weren’t taken away from me. I felt like I either had to listen to my treatment team or my coaches. Like I had to choose between recovery or athletics.
My sophomore year of track, I ended up qualifying for state again. Going into that race, I knew that if I wanted to place, I was going to have to change my race strategy and go out a lot harder than I normally would. I can remember that, as I hit the last curve, my vision started to go in and out. In my head, I was thinking: I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the finish line. Somewhere in the last 5-10 meters, I just went down. I truly think that I passed out and hit the track so hard it woke me back up. At the time, I blamed it on how hard I started, but my eating disorder was a part of it.
The following summer, I went up to a higher level of care - a partial hospitalization program. Insurance ended up not covering my treatment, so I went back with my therapist, was not doing well, and eventually got admitted to a residential program. Again, I just did the bare minimum to get by. Within a month and a half of coming back home [after my first inpatient stay], I went back to residential for 11-13 weeks. It was during that stay that I realized I had to be serious about recovery if I didn’t want my life to be like this forever.
S: You touched on how athletics was a large part of your identity back then… Did you ever struggle with your sense of identity after leaving the sport? How did you navigate that? Where do you place your identity now?
E: Going back to visit Dallas is really hard for me. The narrative in my head is that I was the “athlete who never made it”. I remember once, a really kind teacher at our school commented that I was going to be winning the open 400 as a senior. Knowing that people thought that about me, but never being able to attempt it, made me feel like I was a huge failure… And I’m still working through and navigating who I am outside of sports.
I’ve learned a lot about grief. Grief isn’t just from losing a loved one - you can grieve an expectation or a journey, and I’m still working through the grief of what my eating disorder took away. It’s so hard for me to hold both the grief and the gratitude - I really do love my life now, but the grief is still there.
I will always be an athlete, but the biggest challenge for me is defining what that will look like during different seasons of my life.
S: So what does your relationship with running, or just movement in general, look like at this stage in your life, now that you’ve chosen recovery?
E: Right now, I really love Burn Bootcamp - there’s so many people with different goals; you can modify exercises up or modify down. There’s a competitive aspect, which I love, but not as much comparison.
But I still really have to catch myself, and know what my intention is going into any workout. Finding the balance of knowing that I love high intensity movement, and being able to incorporate it without using it as compensation for body image or food. Some days, if I really am in my head, I don’t work out - I make myself challenge those disordered thoughts. Learning how to check what part of myself is needing care/attention, and figuring out how I can give myself that in a healthy, adaptive way has been so important.
I’ve been trying to think of it as a privilege, now that we live in a time where I believe fueling your body is counter-cultural. It gets me so fired up. I get to choose my recovery.
Fueling my body is the foundation of my training. There are days where maybe that doesn’t feel true - but I have to remind myself that just because it doesn’t always feel true doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Now, after all my work with dietitians and learning the science behind what my body needs just to function, it’s crazy to think that people consider choosing to be healthy [by eating enough] is somehow “worse” for your training. That’s just mind-baffling to me. Even if I were to lay on this couch all day and just breathe, I would need to eat just for my heart, brain, and lungs to work. It’s fascinating.
I’m the strongest I’ve ever been AND the most free with my eating that I’ve ever been. If you’re just choosing to fuel your body, you’re setting a solid foundation for your training - and no one gets to tell you otherwise.
S: You’ve talked about how the 1. factually incorrect and 2. completely inappropriate comments from coaches contributed to your eating disorder. From the perspective of an athlete, what do you think coaches should do differently to prevent this cycle of harm from continuing?
E: I do think that coaches should - at a minimum - have some sort of training with eating disorder signs and awareness. And if you think your athlete is displaying these signs, refer them to a professional. They need to see a registered, eating disorder dietitian. And to coaches, if you’re ever going to say anything about food, it should be encouraging adequate nourishment for your athletes. I think it’s important for coaches to know the scope of their practice - they can’t treat disorders or make recommendations unless they’re a registered dietitian. You need to refer your athletes to a professional for those things.
I know the reality is that a lot of future athletes are going to struggle with these things, and that just breaks my heart. But change starts with choosing recovery for ourselves, and I hope that it just becomes a ripple effect throughout the sport.
S: If you had to give a message to younger athletes, what would you tell them?
E: I want other athletes to hear that they can love their sport, get better at it, and be competitive - but it doesn't have to be your whole identity. That’s not all you are. You’re not just your sport, ever. Knowing who you are, focusing on values outside of the sport, and doing some sort of identity work is really important for young athletes.
Everyone’s sports season comes to an end, whether that’s an “easy” choice, like finishing the last race of your collegiate career; or if it’s a harder choice, like because of an injury. Whatever it is, you know that it’s going to end at some point, so having fun is the most important thing. The moment that your identity is so wrapped up in your performance that it starts to take away from the joy of your sport, you need to reflect.
I wish I had known what I valued about myself outside of my sport, so I would’ve had a solid foundation of who I am apart from loving athletics. A lot of days, I still have to be really intentional with remembering that. I would like to be empathetic, kind, compassionate, servant-hearted, hardworking, and loyal to other people. If my workouts are supporting those values, then great - I’m in a good headspace. If not, then I need to take a step back.
I think it’s important for all of us to know who we want to be, and ask ourselves “does the way I move my body support these values?” If it doesn’t, we need to ask ourselves what needs to change - because our identity shouldn't change for our sports.
Mental Health Resources
NAMI HelpLine: 1-800-950-NAMI
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Dial 988
NEDA Treatment Directory: map.nationaleatingdisorders.org
References
[1] 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
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