S03E33 ELITE ATHLETES AND THEIR STRUGGLES WITH SELF IMAGE

You would think Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir - the DOTTIRS of ICELAND and the Fittest Women in the World would have no problems with their self images, right? But perhaps it is not so surprising that elite athletes themselves grapple with how they look all the time.

This podcast episode discusses their recent episode of their podcast @DOTTIR, titled "What Should The Fittest Women on Earth look like?"

How can we relate to their struggles and learn how to deal with our own self-image challenges?

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@crossfittraining @crossfit #crossfit #sports #exercise #health #movement #crossfitcoach #clean #fitness

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2023.02.015 S03E33 ELITE ATHLETES AND THEIR STRUGGLES WITH SELF IMAGE

[00:00:00] Sam Rhee: This episode is commentary on the Dottir Podcast, which was titled, What Should The Fittest Women on Earth look like? This was released February 6th, 2023 last week, and it's the two high level CrossFit athletes, Annie Thorisdottir, and Katherine Davidsdottir who talk about their self-image and their struggles with self-image. I suppose it's not surprising that even high level athletes have significant struggles with their body image. That might even be obvious particularly in sports where aesthetics is placed at a premium such as ice skating, gymnastics, body building.

It was a great podcast, and there were four takeaway points that I thought were worth talking about.

The first point is, is that you may not be able to change what you think your ideal body type is for yourself but you can recognize how you came to think that way, and you should acknowledge where your influences are.

Listening to Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir, they both had gymnastic backgrounds and it was very obvious that a lot of their influence in regards to their self-image came from their training. It came from their coaches.

It came from unhealthy counseling from their coaches. Gymnastics is a sport that's notorious for placing a premium on aesthetics, particularly thin and small.

And listening to them talk about what their coaches told them about food, about their body shape, about what they could or could not eat. It was obvious that this had very powerful formative experiences for them, and they recognized it.

They talked about how that shaped what they thought their ideal body image should be later on in life.

Changing these ideas in our heads is extremely difficult, and we may not be able to shake off some of these influences that we had when we were younger, including what people have taught us about our own body and what it should look like.

But it is really important that we recognize that these are influences and that we can work on it.

At least accept and recognize what it is that we think of ourselves.

Sometimes there are very deep-rooted issues and those may take a lot of work for some of us to overcome.

One of the things that I found very interesting is they didn't really talk about an hourglass figure as being ideal. What they kept harping on for themselves was wanting to be skinny and not fat, which again comes from their influences from being gymnasts.

and I think that that shows that everybody is different. Men and women.

There are certain individual characteristics that we may care or not care about, but it really just depends on ourselves. For men, it may be the amount of hair that we have. It might be height, it might be a gut, it might be the size of our biceps. And for women, it may be a particular body shape or even body part.

The second takeaway is that food relationships are obviously very complicated,

and how we deal with food is much more complicated than just exerting willpower. There are complicated physiologic relationships. There's a lot that has to do with genetics, our environment, our culture,

both Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir, talked about positive and negative influences that they had with food when they were children. They mentioned a lot of positive influences from their parents and a lot of negative influences from their coaches.

Those influences can be very important to how we deal with food ourselves.

But obviously there's a lot more than that. There are several new medications out, including Ozempic, which have given us a lot of information about the complex relationships our body has with food.

That feeling of fullness, why some people feel more sated and full than others.

So it's not just about people lacking willpower. There is much more that I think we need to understand about food and our relationships with food. One of the things that the Dottirs did do is talk about how they have shifted their focus on function related to food.

And that's where I think being a high level CrossFit athlete has helped them look at food in a way that focuses on how it impacts their body in a fitness related capacity.

It might be obvious to think of food as fuel, but most of us also think of it as something that's pleasurable, something that we enjoy.

But I think it can be very helpful for a lot of people to focus on what food does, to impact their performance.

The third takeaway point dovetails with the second point in the sense a focus on function can help people divert an obsession or maybe a negative obsession with aesthetics.

For both Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir, they're both high level CrossFit athletes and as such, they have focused solely on competing, so anything that's in their life related to their bodies, if it's not helping them perform better, it's not something that they're particularly interested in. Even though they do care about their aesthetics, which is pretty obvious from the podcast, the fact that they've been able to focus on what it is that is helping them become competitive, helps strip away some of the unhealthy issues that they may have had with their self image.

Katrin Davidsdottir talks about several years ago where she had such a focus on being lean and making her macros without actually focusing on how an increase in food intake might actually help her performance, was a great discussion and it was that realization that it wasn't really about looking as lean as you could look, it was about making sure you could perform as best as you could, even if you necessarily didn't look sculpted.

That helped them a lot in terms of not worrying so much about what it is that their physical body looked like, because they could take pride in the ability to perform at the highest level.

And I think that that's very similar for athletes of a lot of different sports. If you're a high level cyclist or if you're a devoted practitioner to yoga, all of these disciplines, anything where you're focusing on your healthy athletic performance will probably help you with over obsessing about your appearance.

The last takeaway may actually sound contradictory to what I just said, but working on your aesthetics is also healthy as well. If you can accept where you are, be realistic about yourself and have a healthy mindset about it.

Clearly, Annie Thorisdottir and Katrin Davidsdottir care about how they look, how they present, how they feel they look in front of others and they've detailed some of these concerns in their podcast, particularly Annie Thorisdottir post-pregnancy. She had concerns about what her belly looked like.

And these are concerns that all of us have all the time. Caring about our appearance and working on it means we care about ourselves.

The key is understanding what efforts are healthy, what is realistic. There are some things that can be achieved with nutrition and exercise, and then there are other changes which, you know, no matter how much you lose weight or you fitness, sometimes you need the help of others, like a plastic surgeon.

Even Matt Frazier now that he's no longer competing, he works out for aesthetics.

And I see a lot of CrossFitters who also do body building work. They do additional bench press, they do bicep curls, they do other body building for muscle hypertrophy.

These are all healthy endeavors that we should all engage in. The difficulty is trying to figure out what is having that healthy self image and self-esteem, improving ourselves so that we feel better for ourselves. But finding that balance of also understanding and accepting who we are at the end of the day. Thank you.