Not all eating struggles look the same—just like not all athletes do
If you’ve coached for more than a minute, you already know this truth: no two athletes are the same. One walks in chasing a podium. Another is just trying to finish the warm-up without quitting. You adjust. You meet them where they are. Because coaching isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s responsive. It’s relational. It’s about seeing what that person needs today, in that moment, in that body.
But when it comes to food? We forget that. We flatten the nuance. We apply one lens, one assumption, one solution. We treat every struggle like it’s the same.
To help coaches understand the nuance, let’s talk in CrossFit terms—because just like athletes fall into different categories, so do food struggles. Some show up with intensity and extremes. Others show up quietly, inconsistently, or without a clear name. Just like we recognize elite, scaled, adaptive, and masters athletes by their abilities and needs, disordered eating presents on a spectrum. It varies by degree.
You speak CrossFit? Perfect. Let’s talk about food struggles in your language.
The divisions
Elite Athletes — Dialed in, strict routines, live and breathe performance.
Now, imagine that same intensity applied to food: extreme control, obsessiveness, and no flexibility. That’s where we see some of the clinical eating disorders — anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia. From the outside, it looks like discipline. Meal-prepping to the gram. It’s not someone choosing kale over cookies. It’s someone terrified of the cookie. It’s fear. It’s the belief that if we micromanage every bite, maybe we’ll finally feel safe — or enough.
Then we’ve got the Masters Athletes—decades of experience, often managing old injuries or burnout or a body that just doesn’t bounce back like it used to.
The disordered eating mirror— looks like the long-term dieters. They’ve been in the trenches for years. They’ve done it all: Keto. Paleo. Atkins. Jenny Craig. Weight Watchers. Juice cleanses back when we thought cayenne pepper and lemon water could fix everything. They’re not new to the game — they’re practically veterans. But that doesn’t mean they’ve found peace. What they have found is a lifetime of food rules burned into their brain. The “good food” lists. The guilt. It’s not loud or dramatic — it’s just always there. A low-grade hum of exhaustion from decades of trying to “get it right.”
They’re not chasing skinny anymore — they’re chasing relief. Freedom. A break from the internal tug-of-war between what they want to eat and what they think they should eat. And after all these years, that fight still feels like a full-time job.
Foundation Athletes are just starting. Maybe they’re unsure, maybe they don’t feel “fit enough,” but they’re trying.
Disordered eating mirror— this looks like emotional eating, inconsistency, and chaotic food patterns. It’s not always “disordered” by diagnosis—but it’s disordered in behavior. These are the folks who don’t even realize they’re using food to regulate emotions—they just know they feel out of control. It often shows up in ways that feel small or insignificant: skipping breakfast, mindless snacking, overeating on weekends, or restarting a new “plan” every Monday. These aren’t people trying to “cheat”—they’re trying to cope. They just don’t have the tools yet.
Teens? They’re just trying to find their place — in the world and in the gym. Everything feels new, awkward, high-stakes. They’re navigating social pressure, identity, and insecurity, all while their bodies are changing and everybody’s watching (or at least, that’s how it feels to them).
Disordered eating mirror— You’ll see early restriction, food fear, and body comparison that starts way too young. This is where it begins: the quiet skipping of meals, obsessively counting macros they don’t even understand yet, hiding snacks, overtraining because they saw a fitness influencer do it. They’re at high risk — not because they’re broken, but because they’re impressionable. And our culture doesn’t hand them tools. It hands them TikTok
Then there’s the Adaptive Athlete category—those with different baselines, different needs, and often misunderstood challenges.
Disordered eating mirror—Think ARFID, trauma-linked eating patterns, sensory issues, Pica, Rumination… my goodness these lists are not exhaustive. It’s just to give you a taste.
And finally, the biggest group in the gym: Scaled Athletes. They’re a little bit of everything.
Disordered eating mirror— This is where the silent majority lives. Emotional eaters. Binge and restrict cycles. People who use food to cope, to celebrate, to soothe. People who blame themselves for being “undisciplined,” when the real issue is no one ever taught them how to regulate without food. You might see it in a client who constantly asks, “Is this okay to eat?” It shows up in the way they punish themselves with workouts after eating something “bad.” They’re not lacking discipline—they’re lacking a sense of safety around food.
Starting to see the pattern?
Disordered eating shows up just like CrossFit athletes do—in every division, in every lane. Some are easy to spot. Others are hidden behind smiles, strength, or even success. But they’re all here.
You wouldn’t coach a masters athlete the same way you’d approach someone on their first day. Because you understand the nuances. You meet people where they are.
The same is true with food struggle.
Don’t try to be their therapist in Nanos. You’re not here to fix—just to witness. To hold space without flinching when it shows up. Different divisions. Different needs. Same humanity.
That’s the work. That’s the invitation—to take a step back and see the full spectrum for what it is. Food struggles, like CrossFit divisions, exist in categories that are interwoven, overlapping, and sometimes hard to distinguish—but they are different. They share many similarities, they’re all under the same umbrella, but they vary by degree. They require different eyes, different questions, and different forms of support. Just like we wouldn’t throw an elite athlete into a foundations class—or ask a scaled athlete to PR their snatch on day one—we shouldn’t hand everyone the same nutrition protocol and call it coaching. Let’s stop assuming a single template can fix every body, every history, every relationship with food—and then acting shocked when it doesn’t work.
Understanding the differences is how we coach better—and how we care deeper. If you coach humans, you’re already coaching this—even if you didn’t realize it. Now you do. The point isn’t to turn you into a specialist. Leave that to the specialists. It’s just to to turn on the lights.
