Skiing and that competitive drive bring a lot of joy to Ailey

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.

Brooke Ailey spends hundreds of hours every winter training at the Lappe Nordic Ski Centre just outside Thunder Bay, Ont., and hopes to be accepted to the National Team Development Centre. The Grade 12 student is sharing her story of dealing with an eating disorder to help others. (Submitted by Brooke Ailey)

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.

Thoughts of food were all-consuming

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 makes avocado toast with grape tomatoes as a snack at home after a brief afternoon ski. (Logan Turner/CBC)

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."

We want people to recognize that despite the stereotypes about who eating disorders affect, they really do not discriminate.

- Aryel Maharaj, outreach and education

Aryel Maharaj, a spokesperson with NEDIC, added that anyone can be affected by disordered eating.

"We want people to recognize that despite the stereotypes about who eating disorders affect, they really do not discriminate," he said in an email to CBC News.

With that said, Maharaj added there is research that indicates women and girls are disproportionately affected, people of colour are just as likely to be affected as white people but are less likely to reach out for help, and members of the LGBTQ community are five times more likely to have disordered eating than someone who is cisgender and heterosexual.

"Many think that athletes don't struggle with disordered eating, but in fact, many do in silence because of how normalized it is in sport,

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