This competitive skier survived an eating disorder. Now the Ontario teen is sharing her story to help others
CBC
Brooke Ailey strides through the Lappe Nordic Ski Centre to her locker, where a hanging poster reads, "Girls in sports are empowered for life."
She grabs her equipment and heads to the wooded trails in Thunder Bay, Ont., that have groomed dozens of world-class cross-country ski athletes. Ailey, 17, is putting in hundreds of hours every year, trying to join that list.
Skiing and that competitive drive bring a lot of joy to Ailey, she told CBC News, but it's also caused harm. In August 2019, after her mother recognized possible symptoms and brought her to a doctor, Ailey was diagnosed with disordered eating.
"For me, it became destructive when I started looking at my body in a negative way … just like this mentality that if I wanted to be better, I needed to be lighter or I needed to be leaner," she told CBC News.
It's a mentality experts say is shared by many athletes — especially young, female competitors — and is a major concern that must be understood and addressed in sports across the country.
Now, Ailey is sharing her story to raise awareness about eating disorders in athletics.
For the longest time, Ailey didn't want to believe she had an eating disorder.
"How can I have an eating disorder if I've got the energy to go out and do a 10-kilometre race? Or how could I have an eating disorder if I'm still eating a ton when I finish my race?" Ailey remembers thinking.
While an eating disorder can manifest in different ways. Ailey said she began obsessing over what food she was eating and couldn't eat, if it was good or bad food, and how many calories she was burning.
It took up her entire day.
Ailey was diagnosed with orthorexia, which is when someone becomes consumed by thoughts of healthy eating to the point it becomes detrimental to one's own health.
While many people associate disordered eating with more well-known diagnoses like anorexia or bulimia, orthorexia is one of many lesser-known eating disorders that involve — sometimes dangerously — unhealthy obsessions with food, according to the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC).
One of the reasons Ailey wanted to share her story is to break the stereotypes of what an eating disorder looks like, she said, "because eating disorders can occur without weight loss and still be dangerous.
"We have all these harmful ideas of what an eating disorder is and what it looks like. And a lot of athletes don't see themselves fitting into that, which is difficult because there is a lot of disordered eating that happens in athletics —especially cross-country skiing … like we're skiing in these tiny little Lycra suits. Everybody can see our bodies. You can see everything."