By Dr. Giovanna Taranto
WHO HITS?
In high level sports where a lean body is required, capable of performing great performances such as the jumps of artistic gymnastics or dance, and the power in some specialties of athletics and swimming, the athletes, often very young, must maintain a weight optimal body, often using drastic diets.
The Triad is not just about high-level athletes, but any woman who trains excessively without an adequate daily caloric intake, that is, feeding inadequately.
The most recent studies have shown that sport is not the real cause of triad-related disorders, but rather an imbalance between the energies spent on training and those introduced through the diet.
WHAT IS TRIAD?
It is a set of physical and mental disorders that includes:
- Eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, ED-NOS)
- Menstrual cycle disorders (oligomenorrhea, amenorrhea, anovulatory cycles, LPD)
- Decreased bone density of varying degrees (osteopenia, osteoporosis)
HOW DO YOU MANIFEST?
Usually the first disturbance concerns food, so you start having a bad relationship with food, going from avoiding some foods that are considered too caloric, to the real obsession that your body is never thin enough.
Not all the subjects have the same symptoms, and not all of them become anorexic, each individual is a case in itself.
FEEDING DISORDERS
They have been divided into different types based on behavioral characteristics, they all derive from a state of mental suffering of the person who does not accept the shapes of his body and tries to control (by decreasing it) his body weight at any cost.
BED (binge eating disorder) can be identified as the first step towards more serious disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa, although it often goes unnoticed. It consists of recurring binges of food (at least 2 times a week) whose characteristic is the loss of control over food, which at that moment has only positive aspects; in fact, the person who stuffed himself does not think about the negative aspects that his behavior may have on his health. We think of "immediately" and not "after".
The phenomenon of binge eating can easily lead the person to behaviors such as induced vomiting, the use of laxatives or draining or any other means to expel from the body all that was introduced during the binge. This characterizes Bulimia Nervosa.
Anorexia Nervosa is the most serious disorder because it can lead the subject to literally die of hunger. The anorexic subject always sees himself as overweight even if his body weight is 15% lower than the norm!
In addition to the aforementioned eating disorders there are others that are grouped together in eating disorders not otherwise specified (ED-NOS: Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified).
In some cases, eating disorders are diagnosed due to the absence or irregularity of the menstrual cycle in the athlete.
What triggers the triad, in fact, is not so much the eating disorder in itself, but the energy imbalance, so even subjects not suffering from mental disorders, which then lead to eating disorders, may incur in the Triad due to training that is too intense combined with a disordered diet that leads to an inadequate amount of available energy.
The human body has control systems capable of blocking the functioning of certain physiological mechanisms when the available energies are barely sufficient to maintain vital functions, such as normal cellular function, thermoregulation, etc.
The athlete's body perceives the state of energy deficiency by blocking the reproductive system, whose functioning requires a lot of energy, starting from the limitation of the production of sex hormones such as estrogen.
