THE past couple of years have seen an increase in awareness from sporting governing bodies about their duty of care to their athletes and in keeping with this, Scottish Athletics has announced that it will hold an education seminar called ‘Supporting Athletes with an Eating Disorder’ on Friday the 12th of January in Edinburgh, the evening before the Great Edinburgh Cross-Country event takes place.
Earlier this year, former Scottish international high jumper, Jayne Nisbet revealed that she had suffered from eating disorders throughout her career, before going on to release a book, ‘Free-ed’ about her experiences.
Nisbet will be one of the speakers at the seminar and will talk about her experience of suffering from an eating disorder, as well as sharing what she has learnt from the challenges she faced and her subsequent recovery.
Also present will be Louise Capicotto, who is a BPS Chartered Sport and Exercise Psychologist in-training based at Loughborough University and is an Academy Coach at the Female Coaching Network.
She has conducted research into the support of athletes with disordered eating and has personal experience of eating disorders spanning over a decade during her time competing as an athlete within track and field and power-lifting.
Elite sport is a cut-throat environment and the prevalence of eating disorders is significantly higher amongst elite athletes than it is amongst the general population. This Scottish Athletics seminar is open to athletes themselves, as well as coaches and parents,, who often can have a major role to play in halting the progress of an eating disorder, as well as spotting the development of one.
There will be a number of topics covered on the night, including raising awareness of eating disorders and how this can affect, recognising the signs and how to communicate with the athlete, availability of support and resources for parents, coaches and athletes, including current treatment issues for athletes, and how athletes could be better supported when returning to sport.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel