Trigger Warning (TW): This content discusses eating disorders, including behaviours and experiences related to disordered eating. Please proceed with caution if this may be triggering.
Chelsea Blissett is an Australian football player, currently playing for Brisbane Roar. At the age of only 24, she has inspired many after speaking openly and frankly about her experiences with an eating disorder as a female footballer. In this piece I have delved deeper into her story which she has shared, as well as how this reflects a significant issue within women’s football.
Chelsea’s Story:
When describing her earliest memories of her relationship with food, Blissett remembers standing in the changing room of a swimwear shop in Queensland, when the voice in her head first started whispering. She was about 14 years old and had been looking forward to this trip for weeks. But when she walked into the changing room and pulled the curtain closed, she looked at herself in the mirror, and all she could do was cry.
In an interview with ABC News in Australia, Blissett told Samantha Lewis:
“I hated everything. I couldn’t handle it. I was like, ‘I hate what I look like in this.’”
“I remember getting into an argument with my mum because she was like ‘oh, I like this one! And this one!’ and I had to keep saying ‘no, I don’t like how it looks on me, I don’t like anything about it.’”
She went on to detail how her eating disorder got more serious a few years later, when she had moved away from home and was developing more anxiety. She described this as the moment when her binges started happening.
“But looking back, I definitely was starting to have triggers and thoughts and feelings which, now, were maybe early warning signs.”
In a short film posted on social media in January 2023, she opened up about the pressures she faces, not only as an athlete, but as a young woman growing up in a hyper-visual culture, and how the many unacknowledged stresses of her life manifested in a desire to control her food and her body.
Blissett has described how she wants the conversation surrounding eating disorders to begin in sport, as football has played a significant role in her own journey, in both positive and negative ways.
Living away from home, the stress of her studies, growing into her own body, and her football career, all contributed to the anxiety that slowly morphed from more ‘socially acceptable’ diets and exercise regimes into symptoms associated with bulimia nervosa.
“I didn’t really know what was going on, so I would emotionally turn to food all the time”, she says. “I would have these binges, which then developed into bingeing and purging, just trying to get that release of tension and anxiety.” she told ABC news.
“It was definitely a need for control. I got anxious, I was out of control, I was overwhelmed, so I would binge, and then I would purge to gain back a sense of control, because that was the thing that made me feel better.”
“I don’t think football initially had anything to do with me developing my eating disorder- no one had ever said anything about my weight or my body image- but it did help mask what the issues were. People would say ‘oh, she’s just exercising more, trying to get fit and eat healthy for football’, you know?”
“And because I was validated by what I was doing, and everyone was like ‘well, she looks great! She’s doing so well!’ then I think that was more of a cover for what was already happening.”
Over time, her bulimia took more of a serious physical toll. Blissett struggled to regulate her own body-heat, her nails became brittle, she slept badly and was constantly craving food, and her face became pale and sunken. When she would stand up she would immediately feel dizzy, and her resting heart-rate also dropped. She also described how her period stopped for two years:
“I saw a GP early on in my recovery, and they told me: just go on the pill. That was their solution to me not having my period? To go on the pill? I was lucky that my mum was not comfortable with that.”
She was scared to tell her club, Melbourne City. But after an away trip where she had extreme anxiety and struggled to eat shared meals, the club’s medical staff connected her with the PFA (the players’ union) who put her in touch with a psychologist.
“Once I spoke up, they handled it very, very well. I was never made to feel anything less than who I was, and my worth was never questioned just because I had an eating disorder. They never made me feel like that.”
“My coaches always said: if you ever feel anxious or anything, please tell us. We don’t want you to be training and not having a great time. So, the club were amazing, but it was on me to kind of tell them first, rather than the other way around.”
Eating disorders in women’s football:
Research also highlights the fact that Blissett’s story is similar to many others in women’s football, in fact, the number of female footballers who suffer from disordered eating is high. In 2022, the first academic study to explore the prevalence of mental health issues among leading women players in England revealed that 36% of the 115 who completed the confidential survey displayed eating disorder symptoms.
Meanwhile 115 exhibited indications of moderate to severe anxiety and a further 11% struggled with moderate to severe depression. While similar rates of anxiety and depression have been recorded in both the general population and other elite athletes of both genders, the number of eating disorders among female footballers are seemingly higher.
Australia’s head nutritionist, Alicia Edge, says:
“This isn’t just football specific- this is very much sport-specific- but we’ve been talking a lot in the professional space about the over-emphasis of body composition and weight and what an athlete looks like, compared to what impact that has on performance.”
“That over-emphasis comes from both external parties- whether that’s support team, parents, peers, well-meaning people that really do believe it- but also internally, so the player can feel that comparison and pressure to look a certain way or be a certain weight.”
She also talked about how disordered eating is very high in football, more than anyone could anticipate. She said:
“That’s when I realised that I can just continue putting out fires, or we can make a long-term plan to actually change the culture and the conversation when it came to nutrition and body composition. And that’s hopefully what we’ve been improving over the last three or four years.
Players in Australia are now screened twice a year in the form of one-on-one interviews where they’re asked questions around their relationship with food, their energy levels and their overall wellbeing, as well as things like food affordability and security. This program filters all the way down into their junior national teams, teaching players how to reframe their relationships with their bodies and with food and providing the latest research around the symptoms of disordered eating. Old methods of measuring athletes, for example, skin-fold tests, set weights and body composition scans have also been eliminated from the national team, as well as athletes being taught about their own rights around what can be measured.
Chelsea’s hopes for the future:
Speaking on her own hopes for the future and how more support can be provided for female footballers suffering from an eating disorder, Blissett said:
“It’s something that needs to be talked about. No one ever really knows what goes on behind someone’s closed door or how they feel. I think that’s one of the reasons why [eating disorders] are not so much at the forefront; it’s such an isolating and secretive disease. That’s what it thrives on, that’s what it craves.”
“I wish there was more knowledge, more people understanding the way they think and feel, and maybe just more information on disordered eating.”
“People have now gotten to the point where it’s socially acceptable to talk about your anxiety and depression- because it should be socially acceptable to talk about those things- but I don’t believe it’s socially acceptable to talk about your eating disorder. That’s where I want it to come to.”
Blissett also spoke about her own personal recovery, saying she’s still learning now.
“I’m at a good point in my life where I feel comfortable speaking about it, but I don’t want people to think that because I’m speaking up, I’m recovered and that it’s never going to happen again. For me, over the past year and a half, I’ve still been having to ‘break’ food rules. I still feel anxious, still find myself thinking those old thoughts.”
She spoke about how one of the ways that she has learned to manage is by separating her illness from who she is as a person:
“It’s a disease; it’s an illness. It’s something separate, it’s attacking me, in a similar way to having something within your body attacking you physically.”
“So every time I did get a thought or a feeling, I could use that and say, ‘it’s not me. It’s someone else and they’re just trying to hurt me, they’re trying to make me do something that’s going to bring me down, to make me not want to recover, to make my life feel like it’s not worth it.”
Chelsea Blissett sharing her story so openly and honestly, as well as inspiring many and highlighting the importance of more conversation around eating disorders within women’s football, has also arguably brought to light how this isn’t an issue that affects a select few footballers- in fact, the numbers are worryingly high. Whilst it is evident that progress has been made to provide better support, it is also clear that much more needs to be done and there is still a long way to go, when it comes to support from a young age to hopefully reduce the number of footballers who experience an eating disorder, as well as providing support for those who do.
Photo – https://sportalburywodonga.com.au/person/chelsea-blissett/
