Eating Disorders in Climbing: Deceptive Mountain Air

Gravity can be mean. She pulls on you, makes every move difficult. If you’re light, it’s easier and you don’t have to pull as much body weight up. One thing is clear: if you want to climb at the highest level, you have to watch your diet. In few sports is weight as present as in this sport. A light body can make many things easier.

For some athletes, this develops into anorexia. You eat restrictively, lose a lot of weight, these are just some of the consequences of this addiction. Anorexia is the deadliest mental illness. Affected people need urgent treatment, but even that is no guarantee that they will be able to leave the disease behind.

Climbing has a RED-S issue

It is all the more important that the associations protect athletes from themselves. Last week, two doctors resigned from the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) Medical Commission. Her accusation: The association does too little against eating disorders. This is what the German climbing doctor Volker Schöffl writes on Instagram. As doctors, they could no longer accept this. Suggestions for action on how affected athletes could be found and how they could be helped – the medical commission had been working on this for years – were not considered.

According to Schöffl, sport climbing has a RED-S problem, also known as a relative lack of energy. The body does not receive enough food, i.e. energy. Important functions can still be carried out for the time being, and sporting performance can also be called up. The dangerous thing: the body goes along with it for a long time. Athletes achieve success and forget about themselves and their health. The long-term consequences can only become apparent after the end of a career.

Stefanie Sippel Published/Updated: , A comment by Christopher Meltzer Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 5 Bernd Steinle Published/Updated:

The association does not want to drastically adjust its rules. A statement said the approach followed until 2022, which was based on body mass index (BMI), did not live up to expectations. The association does not show an alternative. The IFSC wants national federations to take a look at their athletes. But the protective view from above would also be important so that the climbers can practice their sport safely – and are healthy when, years later, they are more on the ground than up.