Athletes are taught to have a particular relationship with their bodies. Work harder. Train smarter. Push through. The body is the instrument, and the instrument has to perform. In many ways, that frame is useful. It builds discipline, resilience, and a sense of physical capability that carries well beyond sport.
But that same frame can also create a complicated relationship with body image. When your body is evaluated primarily by what it can do, and also constantly compared to other athletes and to performance standards, the line between healthy commitment and distressing self-assessment can become difficult to find.
Body image concerns are not rare among athletes, including young athletes in competitive environments like the one many families in the Triangle are navigating. Understanding how athletic culture intersects with body image distress, and what actually helps, is something we work with regularly at Lepage Associates.
Why Athletes Are Not Immune to Body Image Distress
There is a common assumption that athletes, because they are physically fit and capable, do not struggle with body image. The reality is more complicated.
Athletic culture involves a significant amount of body evaluation. Coaches comment on performance, and sometimes on size, weight, or composition. Teammates compare and uniforms leave little to hide. For athletes in aesthetic sports like gymnastics, figure skating, or dance, appearance is part of the judged performance itself. For athletes in weight-class or endurance sports, hitting a specific weight or body composition can feel like a competitive requirement.
At the same time, athletes are often trained to suppress discomfort. Push through the pain and don't show weakness. These values, which serve a real purpose in training, can also make it harder to notice or acknowledge that the relationship with the body has become distressing rather than productive.
Body image distress in athletes often looks different from what most people picture. It may not be visible. It may not involve extreme weight restriction. It can be a quiet but persistent background noise: constantly evaluating, comparing, and finding the body lacking, even while the body is performing well.
The Comparison Trap in Sports
Social comparison is something all of us do. For athletes, the comparison environment is particularly concentrated. You train alongside people whose bodies you can see every day. You watch competitors perform. You are aware of teammates' stats, coaches' comments, and the physical standards your sport implicitly rewards.
Social media has intensified this. Research shows a direct link between appearance-focused social media use and elevated psychological distress. For young athletes in Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and across North Carolina, the comparison is no longer limited to their own team or school. It extends to highlight reels from athletes around the country and to AI-generated or heavily edited images of idealized athletic bodies that were never designed to be realistic benchmarks.
The problem is not the comparison itself. It is the standard being used. When the benchmark is curated, filtered, or built around an elite 1% of performance, the comparison is not informative. It is simply distressing. And the more a young athlete's sense of worth is tied to how their body measures up against that standard, the more vulnerable they are to the distress that follows.
If you are noticing that your teen athlete is increasingly focused on their body in ways that seem to go beyond performance, or if they are showing signs of distress around food, weight, or appearance, support from a therapist who understands both adolescence and athletic culture can make a real difference.
What Body Image Actually Involves
Body image is broader than most people realize. It includes how you think about your body, how you feel about it, how you perceive it physically, and how you behave as a result. For athletes, all four of these components can be shaped by the training environment in ways that are not always noticed.
The perceptual piece is particularly important to understand. Body image distress often involves a genuinely distorted perception of the body, not simply a negative opinion of it. An athlete may perceive themselves as larger, heavier, or differently proportioned than they are. This is not exaggeration or vanity. It is a feature of how the distress works, and it is not corrected by simply being told what the measurements actually say.
The behavioral piece is where distress starts to affect daily life in concrete ways. For athletes, this might look like: obsessive attention to food composition, avoidance of certain social situations involving food or bodies being visible, compulsive exercise beyond what training requires, or significant anxiety around the aspects of sport that involve appearance evaluation.
These patterns, particularly in the teen years when the body is also changing through puberty, can create lasting effects. Adolescence is a critical window for both psychological development and physical maturation. When nutrition is significantly disrupted during this period, the consequences can extend beyond mental health to bone density, hormonal development, and physical health over the long term.
Body Neutrality: A Framework That Makes Sense for Athletes
Body positivity asks people to love how their body looks. For athletes, this can actually cut against the grain of how athletic culture works: the body is constantly being evaluated, adjusted, and pushed toward performance goals. Asking an athlete to feel purely positive about their appearance while also analyzing every aspect of their physical performance creates a real tension.
Body neutrality offers a framework that fits the athletic context more naturally. Rather than focusing on how the body looks, body neutrality redirects attention to what the body does. For athletes, this is already familiar ground. Your body lets you compete. Your body responds to training. Your body has carried you through a season of hard work. That is a stable, accurate, and meaningful way to relate to the body that does not depend on appearance.
The shift body neutrality asks for is relatively small: from how does my body look to what has my body made possible. For athletes who are already practiced at respecting what their body can do, this is not a foreign idea. It is a reframe of something they already have access to.
When Athletic Identity Transitions
One of the most significant body image risk periods for athletes is transition: moving from one level of competition to another, experiencing injury, aging out of a sport, or retiring from athletic life altogether. When a significant portion of identity and self-worth has been tied to athletic performance and the physical body that performs it, losing access to that identity, even temporarily, can be destabilizing.
This is a common and underrecognized challenge. The college athlete who no longer competes after graduation. The teen who is injured for a season. The high school athlete who does not make the college team. In each of these transitions, the body image question shifts from how is my body performing to how does my body matter now. Without a framework that extends beyond performance, that question can become a difficult one.
Supporting young athletes in building sources of confidence, connection, and self-worth that extend beyond athletic identity is one of the most valuable things both parents and therapists can do during active athletic years, not just during transition. The athlete who already knows that their worth is not entirely located in their body's performance will handle that transition very differently from the one who has not had that foundation.
Practical Tools That Work
The same evidence-based approaches used for body image distress in non-athletes are effective for athletes, with some adjustments for context.
1. Naming the thought pattern
The automatic negative thoughts that drive body image distress in athletes tend to follow the same tracks they follow for everyone else: all-or-nothing thinking (my body is either performing or it is failing), mind reading (the coach noticed my weight, my teammates are comparing themselves to me), catastrophizing (if I don't hit this target, my season is over), and overgeneralization (one bad race means my whole body is wrong). Naming the pattern creates distance from the thought. It is the first step in not being run by it.
2. Examining what the thought costs
When thought-challenging does not fully work, the ACT approach asks a different question: what does this thought cost you when you let it drive your behavior? An athlete consumed by body-related thoughts is not fully present in training, in competition, or in the relationships that support their performance. The thought is pulling them away from the very things that matter to them. Creating enough distance from the thought to take the next step, even while the thought is present, is a skill that can be built.
3. Self-compassion as a performance asset
Research in sports psychology consistently shows that self-critical athletes do not perform better than self-compassionate ones. The harsh internal voice that drives constant self-evaluation does not lead to better outcomes. Learning to treat yourself with the same steadiness you would offer a teammate who is struggling is both a psychological skill and a performance asset.
4. Curating the comparison environment
For young athletes, talking explicitly about what social media actually represents, and actively reducing consumption of appearance-focused athletic content that is not realistic or representative, is a direct intervention. It does not require abstaining from social media. It requires recognizing the difference between content that genuinely informs training and content that primarily drives distressing comparison.
What Parents of Young Athletes Can Do
Parents have significant influence over how young athletes develop their body image, often more than they realize.
- Watch your own body talk. Comments you make about your own body, about other athletes' bodies, or about weight and appearance at home shape your child's internal script for how bodies are evaluated. The athlete who hears constant appearance-focused commentary at home is getting a message that appearance is what matters, even if that was not the intent.
- Shift praise toward effort, character, and specific performance. "I saw how much you pushed in the second half" is different from "You looked great out there." Both are positive, but one is more stable, because it is not dependent on appearance.
- Take warning signs seriously. Increased negative body talk, rigid food rules, compulsive exercise beyond training requirements, avoidance of mealtimes, and withdrawal from social situations are all worth paying attention to, not dismissing as normal training behavior.
- Be thoughtful about how you talk about the relationship between food, weight, and performance. Framing food as fuel, and weight as one variable among many in a complex athletic picture, is meaningfully different from framing weight as a primary performance target.
Support Is Available
Body image concerns in athletes are real, common, and treatable. They do not require a diagnosis or a crisis to be worth addressing. If you are a young athlete who is noticing that your relationship with your body feels more distressing than productive, or if you are a parent who is watching that pattern develop in a child, reaching out to a therapist is a reasonable next step.
At Lepage Associates Psychological Services, we work with athletes, teens, families, and adults. Our sports psychology team understands the specific pressures of athletic culture and how they intersect with mental health. Whether you are navigating active competition, an injury transition, or the shift out of organized sport, we are here to help you find practical, positive solutions that move you forward.
Lepage Associates Psychological Services provides solution-based psychological services for individuals, athletes, teens, families, and couples in Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute personal medical advice. If you or someone you care about is in crisis, please call or text 988 or visit your nearest emergency room.