Episode 272: On this week's episode I talk with former US National Team swimmer Eva Merrell from The Hidden Opponent.
Eva Merrell is a former US National Team swimmer and #1 recruit at The University of Georgia. After battling her eating disorder diagnosis and sport ending injury, Eva shifted to mental health advocacy in athletics. She is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Sport Management and Policy at the University of Georgia and works as the Social Media Manager for the mental health nonprofit, The Hidden Opponent. Eva is passionate about speaking up about eating disorders in athletics, advocating for student-athlete mental health, and using her story to help educate and inspire others struggling with eating disorders.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 272 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/272.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients to fully recover from disordered eating and an eating disorder so that their days are no longer governed by fear and anxiety, and instead they can live a meaningful life that is in alignment with their values.
Before get started with this episode, I want to let you know about something new that is coming soon and has actually been in the works for a while now. I’m going to be launching a group programme that shows you how to reach a place of full recovery. It uses the exact same framework that I apply with clients, but in a group setting. The programme is going to start in late May and will run for 12 weeks. This is specifically for people who are ready to recover and want the guidance and the support to make this a reality. I sent an email on Monday and Thursday for those who are on my list, and there’s been a really incredible response, much more than I thought. So I’m really stoked about that. If you like this podcast, if you like the information I share, the approach that I take, and you want to take it from merely information to getting the support to make practical changes in your recovery, then this is for you.
There will be limited spots available, so if you’re interested, please send an email to info@seven-health.com with the word ‘Group’ in the subject line, and I’ll send over further details. The email, again, is info@seven-health.com and put ‘Group’ in the subject line.
On with today’s show. Today’s show is a guest interview, and my guest today is Eva Merrell. Eva is a former U.S. National Team swimmer and the number one recruit at the University of Georgia. After battling her eating disorder diagnosis and sport-ending injury, Eva shifted to mental health advocacy in athletics. She’s currently pursuing her master’s degree in sports management and policy at the University of Georgia and works as the Social Media Manager for the mental health nonprofit The Hidden Opponent. Eva is passionate about speaking up about eating disorders in athletics, advocating for student athlete mental health, and using her story to help educate and inspire others struggling with eating disorders.
It was towards the end of last year that I became aware of The Hidden Opponent. They did a collaboration with the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, and I saw a number of posts about it on Instagram. I then started looking into The Hidden Opponent and really liked what they were doing and the support they were offering in terms of mental health with sport. So I reached out to see if anyone from the organisation was interested in coming on the show, and they suggested Eva.
I’m really glad that they did, because I think that this is a fantastic episode where we had a lot of time to go through Eva’s eating disorder history and where she was someone who was on track to be heading to the Olympics for swimming, but the development of an eating disorder prevented that dream from materialising, and she was sent on a different path.
The majority of the interview is about Eva’s story, and she was very honest about her experience, so if you are someone dealing with an eating disorder, there’s going to be a lot that resonates here. If you are someone where exercise is a big part of your identity and your eating disorder, then this is really going to resonate as well. Then we also spend time talking about mental health in sport more generally and the work that The Hidden Opponent is doing.
I got off the call with Eva and was really struck with what a great job she did in this interview. I know I didn’t have the capacity to speak so clearly, eloquently, and vulnerably at age 23. I struggle to do it now. So I know you’re going to enjoy this one.
At the end, I have a recommendation for you, but for now, here is my conversation with Eva Merrell from The Hidden Opponent.
Hey, Eva. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today.
Eva Merrell: Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Sandel: There are two broad areas that I want to chat about today, and one of them is your personal story. You are someone who was on the U.S. National Swim Team and has also battled with an eating disorder, so I’d love to talk about and for you to share about your experience. Then the other area is about mental health in sport more generally. I know you now work for the nonprofit The Hidden Opponent, so it would be great to talk about this organisation and what it’s doing and some of the areas that it focuses on. Does that sound good?
Eva Merrell: Yes, of course.
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Chris Sandel: Let’s start with you. How did you get into swimming?
Eva Merrell: I got into swimming at a young age. My parents wanted me and my siblings to be water safe, which is a very common theme with swimmers. I did Summer League. Summer League was the very formative beginning, and I loved it. It was super, super fun. When I was 10, I made the transition from just a Summer League swimmer to looking at swimming more seriously, and then started competing competitively when I was around 10.
Chris Sandel: Were you the sporty kid who was into lots of other sports, or it was predominantly swimming?
Eva Merrell: I was a sporty kid for sure. It was mostly my parents encouraging me to play sports. I did basketball, I did flag football, volleyball. I tried a lot of things to see what my interest was, but I’m not a very rough-and-tough athlete; I didn’t like the basketball where you’re getting up with other athletes. Swimming was super individual, and I could deal with it by myself, and I really enjoyed that aspect of the sport.
Chris Sandel: Were your siblings also equally as good at swimming? Did they take to it the way that you did?
Eva Merrell: My brother was a pretty decent swimmer growing up. My sister liked it, but it wasn’t her forte. I was the only one that ended up swimming competitively. They stopped around 10-11 and pursued other avenues.
Chris Sandel: How was that transition from it being – I don’t know if it was a fun thing that then became a serious thing, but how was it to have it become more of a bigger thing?
Eva Merrell: That’s a great question. When I was in Summer League and started competitively swimming, I lived in Colorado, which was a very small swimming community. It was solely based on me just having fun and doing it because I wanted to, and when I was 11, I moved to Southern California, which is a breeding ground for great athletes and great swimmers. I wasn’t really prepared for the shift in seriousness in the sport from Colorado to California.
So it was a decent transition to begin with, but when I moved to California it definitely got more serious, and I realised that just because I was 11, didn’t mean it had to just be fun. There were some kids out there who really, really took it seriously.
Chris Sandel: And that rubbed off on you, or it took a while for you to take that on board?
Eva Merrell: It did rub off on me. I’m not going to lie, it scared me at first. I was like, why are these kids so serious about it? It’s just a fun sport. [laughs] But then when I was starting to get a little better, around 12, I was putting up some great times and swimming fast, I saw for myself, like, wow, I could be really serious about it and I could be a great swimmer. So I think that was the shift – when I personally started to perform better, I realised how open the future was in terms of my involvement in the sport.
Chris Sandel: And what was the reason that you guys moved out to California?
Eva Merrell: It was for my dad’s job. He had lived in California most of his life, and he took a job in Colorado; we lived there for the first 11 years of my life, but my family was there for like 15, and then work and family – I have a lot of extended family out in California, so we made the jump back at that time.
Chris Sandel: And how was that jump back for you?
Eva Merrell: Also a great question. Really, really tough. The culture difference between living in a small town in Colorado – I lived in Newport Beach, California, and it’s just a very different culture, very different way of life. So I personally definitely struggled a lot, just more in terms of school and dealing with a new school system and new friend groups. But I definitely found my way, and I think the one blessing of sport is you automatically have friends when you go to practice every single day. So that was the silver lining, for sure.
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Chris Sandel: What about food as a kid growing up? What was food like in your household?
Eva Merrell: Food was very normalised. I don’t have a lot of positive or negative memories, which I think is a good thing. I wasn’t a very picky eater compared to my brother and my sister. I was not keen to try new foods; I really just stuck to what I knew. I didn’t start thinking about food in a negative or positive way probably until I was around 12 or 13 and entered the middle school phase of life, which is kind of brutal. That’s when I started to think about food and be like, “Oh, maybe it’s something I should care about”, and that’s when those thoughts started in my head.
Chris Sandel: You being a picky eater, how was that handled by your parents? Were you being forced to eat things you didn’t want to eat, or they were pretty accommodating to making things that you would eat?
Eva Merrell: They were accommodating, but they also were tough in a good way, kind of “Don’t leave the table until you try your green beans” type of thing. They definitely encouraged me a lot to take one bite of a new food or try something different at a restaurant that might be prepared in a different style. But when I think back to my picky eating nature, it wasn’t about different kinds of foods. It was more like a texture problem. I really was sensitive to different textures of foods, and that really carried on until I was probably 15. I was just so hesitant to try new things.
At a certain point when I got older, like 12-13, my parents were like, “You know, she’s going to eat what she’s going to eat and we just have to work around it.” [laughs]
Chris Sandel: What then started to shift when you were in middle school with your eating?
Eva Merrell: In middle school, I hit puberty at a very early age in life. I think I was going through my awkward phase of puberty way before my peers. I’m 5’11”; I was tall, I had muscle. I just looked so much different than my peers, and it made me very self-conscious. I started looking at my body and thinking that it was wrong. I was like, “Wow, I’m too big, I’m too tall, this isn’t right.”
So then I was thinking, “I work out a lot already. I already swim hours and hours a day, per week, whatnot. Maybe I’m not eating right.” But I had those thoughts and I never really acted on it. I would still eat the same way, but I started to become really insecure about my body and compare myself to my peers.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting, a couple of things you said. One, the fact that you went into puberty early considering how much training you were doing. I think there’s a lot of girls going into their teenage years who, because of the level of training, aren’t developing at a level that is advanced to their peers. They’re behind their peers. It’s not until they’re 16 that they’re getting their first period or that kind of thing. It’s just interesting to hear that even with the training you were doing, that still happened and the genetics were just there to mean that that was still prioritised.
Eva Merrell: Yeah. My mom and I were actually talking about it just the other week, how she as a parent felt so unprepared for me to reach that time of my life at a young age. She was telling me she could only imagine, as a young 10- or 11-year-old, how that must feel. And then, like you said, some girls don’t go through that until they’re 13, 14, 15, so it just was such a shock for me and my family to navigate that.
Chris Sandel: You said that also part of it was you were much bigger. I wonder, when I think of swimmers – and maybe I’m stereotyping here, but being taller or bigger is a real asset for being a swimmer, so I’m wondering if you were able to take any solace in ‘this is going to be helpful for swimming’, or that wasn’t crossing your mind at that point?
Eva Merrell: I did take some solace in it. I knew my height was an advantage. I knew just the genetic makeup of my body, I’ve always been a muscular person – I knew that was super advantageous. But then when I’d go into my normal school life, it was a little bit harder because my body type was definitely the minority in my school. So swimming-wise, I was okay with it and I could accept, but it was socially a little more difficult.
Chris Sandel: Was that an internal thing, or you were actually having people bullying you or there were comments? What did it actually look like for you?
Eva Merrell: Definitely comments. I had one kid in seventh grade who asked me, if I was such a good swimmer, why my legs were so big – basically calling my legs fat. He was like, “How can you be a good swimmer if you look like that?” Which was a tough comment to hear and receive. Just little things here and there that were tough. That was the only one I really remember that sticks out in my mind.
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Chris Sandel: What did the trajectory then look like in terms of you starting to make changes with your food, in terms of dieting or whatever was going on there, to it then getting a lot worse?
Eva Merrell: That’s a great question. When I was 12 and 13, I was insecure, struggling, but not really acting on anything, and then when I was 15 years old, one summer I was competing and I thought I was going to have this great summer and swim amazing, and I didn’t. I really internalised that poor performance and attributed it to my body, because I worked so hard, I trained so hard, I thought I was doing everything right, and I was like, “Well, maybe it is time to make a change. Maybe it’s time I need to eat healthier, I need to care more, and I need to pay attention to what I’m eating.”
I think it started out very innocently in the sense that my goal wasn’t to calorie restrict in the beginning; it was to essentially make more mindful eating choices and maybe add a couple more vegetables here and there and eat whole grains, that kind of stuff. I really justified my eating habits in the beginning, being like, “I’m making healthy decisions.” That’s the kind of lifestyle I was pursuing and that’s what I told myself.
Chris Sandel: And how did those around you react to these changes? I’m getting a sense if you’re a picky eater and now you’re saying “I’m going to have more vegetables, I’m going to have more of these”, there was probably a lot of celebration that this was the path you were now taking.
Eva Merrell: Yeah, I think there was definitely celebration. I will say my parents were supportive of every decision I made, really independently of weight and health. They just were super supportive parents, so if I wanted to go buy whole grain bread, my mom was like, “Great, that’s so good” or if I wanted to buy any other food, she would support me in that.
But the thing that the celebration came from was the weight loss that ensued from this healthy eating. I started to eat healthier and pay attention to what I was putting in my body, and I think pretty naturally I lost a couple pounds. Other people in my life, like coaches and my peers and even my friends’ parents, started to comment and say, “Wow, you look so good! What are you doing? You look like you’ve lost weight.” That aspect of being celebrated for weight loss really fuelled my drive to eat healthy, because it felt so good to have people tell me that I looked better.
Chris Sandel: Which is just such a horrible thing to have happen and to really cement that at that young age. To tell a 15-year-old, “You look really good, have you lost weight?” – it’s just not a comment that I want someone to make.
Eva Merrell: I 100% agree. I’m 23 right now, and thinking as an adult, it’s so sad to me that a parent would say something like that to a 15-year-old. At 15, your body is supposed to be changing. I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to be losing weight at 15.
Chris Sandel: You’re not, no.
Eva Merrell: I was still growing. It’s just so unfortunate. I would understand it maybe if my peers said something, because we’re young teenagers and kids. But for a parent and a coach to say it, looking back, was super unfortunate.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, because they’re role models. At age 15, your prefrontal cortex is not online in the way that it’s going to be as you get older, and kids at that age make comments. As you said, it’s very different for that versus someone who is an adult who should be complimenting you on lots of other things.
So where did it then go from there? What happened after that summer when you then started losing weight, you started getting compliments? What happened?
Eva Merrell: That was the fall of when I was 15. It was fall time, and then in December I had a swim meet. It was a long course meet in the winter, which was kind of unusual, but it was because it was the Olympic year. It was leading into 2016. I went up to Washington, swam in this meet, and went a time that put me seventh in the nation going into the Olympic year, which – I mean, I dropped a second and a half. It was the swim that I knew I was capable of the summer prior, but it happened in December.
Swimming that time really, really shifted my focus, because I was like, “Wow, I could be a finalist at Olympic Trials. I could be in striking distance of achieving some pretty cool things.” It really shifted – I think that was when my brain went, “Okay, we need to really go all-in on this swimming thing.” I thought of it as like my job. I was like, “I’m going to train and eat and live as if swimming is my job.” Looking back, I would not recommend that for myself. [laughs] I was only 15 and 16; my job was to be a kid and a teenager. But yeah, I had a very severe mental shift after that performance. Which then led to the beginning of my restrictive eating, I think.
Chris Sandel: Especially if this performance happens after you’ve started to change the way you eat, after you’ve lost weight. There becomes an association of “Maybe the reason I’m doing this faster time is because I’ve lost weight and because I’m now paying this attention to my eating, and what if I then take it up a further notch? Where could we go from there?”
Eva Merrell: Yes, you hit the nail on the head. I totally thought that my performance was because of how I had been eating and the changes I had made. Which is also ironic, because thinking back to when I was eating at that time, I wasn’t eating completely 100% healthy. I still had great variety. I think the day I went that really good swim, I shared a bag of donut holes with my sister, which is something you don’t think of when you think of performing. But I definitely thought like, “I made these changes, so I need to step it up to continue to do better.”
Chris Sandel: So then what happened from there?
Eva Merrell: I started going towards this Olympic Trial year and swimming was picking up. It was becoming more and more of a really dedicated part of my life. I remember I started cutting foods out. I started thinking, “Well, I don’t need this. This isn’t necessary for my diet.” After practice – I trained anywhere from 5 to 8 p.m. or 6 to 9 p.m., so right in the middle of dinner, really awkward time to be training. So my post-workout meal/snack, I started cutting that down. I was like, “Well, I don’t need this. I’m not that hungry.” And then it would become a routine.
I’m a very habitual person, even to this day, so when I started cutting something out from my post-practice snack, I wouldn’t add it back in because it became a habit of me not to have it. So it was very slow, very incremental that I started becoming restrictive. I dent even think I realised it at the time. I was just justifying reasons why I didn’t need all of these little items throughout the day.
Chris Sandel: What you’re describing is so common with an eating disorder. It’s just this iteration where you keep creating a new normal. If I ate less yesterday, that’s now the new normal and I can’t eat more today. And maybe it felt more gradual when you were doing it, but a lot of the time with clients, it can be like “I did this for one day and now that is my new normal” or “I started my exercise, that increased, and I did that for one day and now that is the new norm.” There’s this real asymmetry where my food can come down and that becomes the new norm, but going in the opposite direction, I just can’t do that in the same way. And the same with exercise; I can increase it in a very short amount of time, but to go in the opposite direction is just such a challenge.
Eva Merrell: Yeah. I definitely found myself in that kind of scenario down the line. Especially the last couple months of life before I was diagnosed with my eating disorder, it was more of a steep decline of me being so rigid and not being able to escape my bubble of safety that I had created in terms of food and exercise.
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Chris Sandel: How did you figure this out? Was it a coach who pointed this out? Was it your parents? Was it you who realised ‘there’s something amiss here’? How did it reach that point?
Eva Merrell: It’s a long story over many months, but the short version is it was the summer I was 17, so 2+ years after I shifted my eating habits and I was dwindling into an eating disorder. I had mono over this whole summer. I was tired, I was fatigued. The symptoms that come along with mono are very different, and I think fatigue was a huge one for me. So my swimming was being affected for sure, but I still was training every single day. I didn’t even take a break when I had mono; I was just grinding on swimming.
I swam at the end of the summer in Long Island, New York. I was trying to qualify for the National Team for the second year. It reached a point where I was unable to get down the pool. I was so fatigued, I was so weak, that some of my coaching staff that was not a part of my club team – it was more of the USA coaching staff – and my mom encouraged me to go to the hospital to get my bloodwork done. So I did that, and at that point we decided it wasn’t worth it for me to continue competing, so I flew home.
Then my mom got a call one morning at like 4 a.m., and it was the cardiologist from this hospital. He called my mom and he said, “Your daughter’s heart rate when she was in the emergency room was scarily low. With athletes, there is this range of normalcy for athletes to have low heart rates, but your daughter’s was low.” He encouraged that we get it checked out, and that actually was the catalyst to my mom connecting the dots that I probably had an eating disorder. She had seen my rigidity around food; she had noticed the weight loss. I think this heart rate situation I was experiencing was the final straw to where she realised, “Okay, something is totally not right.”
But I would like to say, I don’t think anyone in my life knew that I had an eating disorder because, stereotypically, I was not underweight. Visibly, you wouldn’t think of me having a problem with eating, which is why I think it took so long for everyone to figure out that I was struggling with an eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: This is one of the things I cover often on the podcast. Eating disorders don’t look a certain way. You can have people in all body sizes and shapes who are struggling with an eating disorder. It can be very easy, especially for an athlete, to chalk up lots of different issues that are going on to anything but an eating disorder. You were talking about how much training you we redoing. When you said, “I was diagnosed with mono before this” – I don’t know what the diagnostic criteria is for mono or how that’s diagnosed, and I’m wondering, was that actually mono or you were just so depleted because of what you’d been doing with food and exercise?
Eva Merrell: I agree. I think I probably had the effects of mono – I was diagnosed with it in April or May. I think I probably was sick for a while, but I think the continuation of my horrible symptoms was a direct result of how malnourished I was. But I just didn’t realise it because I thought I was just sick. It was definitely covered up in my mind.
Chris Sandel: When your mom is putting these dots together, where are you in terms of putting these dots together? At the point that she’s coming to this conclusion, are you also already there?
Eva Merrell: I was so far deep into a hole of denial at the time. [laughs] I thought there was no way that I had an eating disorder because I ate three meals a day, I had a couple snacks. And I was so caught up in the stereotypes. I didn’t look at myself and see someone who had an eating disorder. I thought that to have an eating disorder, you didn’t eat at all. I just thought there was no way.
It wasn’t until I was hospitalised for the first time that I really began to want to understand how I could’ve had an eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: Speak more about that. In terms of “I’m seeing this as having an effect on my swimming and this is such a big part of my identity and I need to understand this so I can get back to swimming”?
Eva Merrell: I don’t know. I think I was so shocked when I learned that I had an eating disorder, and I was so unwilling to step back from swimming. I was very unwilling to miss training and to devote some of my attention to my new diagnosis of an eating disorder. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I didn’t think it was something that needed to be addressed.
Then when I was hospitalised and they told me for my first hospitalisation that I needed to be there for three weeks to be medically stabilised, that was the first time that I was like, “Whoa. This is a way bigger issue than I thought it was.” If I had to be in the hospital for three weeks – I really started giving myself permission to listen to the doctors and to meet with a therapist and to understand that what I was doing wasn’t healthy. Because I just thought I was being healthy most of the time. I needed to understand how my behaviours and my thoughts were actually very unhealthy. I needed to grasp that.
Chris Sandel: Once there was that three-week stay, which you said crystallised that idea, were you able to then get on board with that idea? Or there was still many years of ambivalence around the fact that ‘is this really an eating disorder?’ How much was that cemented like, “Oh, this is really a problem and I need to work on this”?
Eva Merrell: I knew it was a problem for sure, but it wasn’t until I left that I realised how tricky and complicated eating disorders were. Before my hospital stay, my eating disorder had never been challenged. No-one had ever tried to address it, to fight it, to deal with it, including me. So then when I got out of the hospital, my parents and my new outpatient treatment team were fighting my eating disorder, and I was trying to fight my eating disorder, which made my eating disorder very angry.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I felt like I really wanted to go back to my old habits and my old life, but I don’t think I could’ve ever gone back to pre-diagnosis life.
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I ended up having another two-week hospital stay a couple months later before going into my first round of treatment at the University of San Diego Eating Disorder Center. I spent basically five months doing PHP and IOP.
Chris Sandel: What’s PHP and IOP, for the listeners?
Eva Merrell: Partial hospitalisation. At UCSD, I did the 10-hour and the 6-hour. And IOP is intensive outpatient, and that was 3 hours. So I would go to a clinic and I would be there for 10 or 6 or 3 hours per day over my life at the programme. They gave me meals, so you had your meals there; you had a variety of different therapies. I had individual therapy. I also had family therapy, because my first time in treatment, I was a minor and it was family-based at that programme. It was a very all-inclusive, well-rounded approach to address my eating disorder, for sure.
Chris Sandel: How well did that work? Where did it get you by having that level of care?
Eva Merrell: I want to preface this by saying I think the programme is amazing. It was an amazing programme. I was not the best patient. I still struggled with accepting that I had to deal with it. I wanted to take shortcuts. I wanted to cheat the system a lot, which only led to relapse. I think if you want to cheat – there is no cheating the system when you’re recovering from an eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: No, there really isn’t. I was having a call with a client today about this as well, talking about you can find your way into an eating disorder where you stumble your way in there – which is often most people’s stories. You don’t do that on the way out. You genuinely have to put in the work and be very conscious about doing all the things to have recovery occur.
Eva Merrell: Oh, 100%. I thought that I had to check the boxes. You check the boxes, you do what they want you to do in programme, you get discharged, and then life will be fine. I got discharged in June before I went to the University of Georgia to swim, and over the summer I was holding my own. I was managing. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful.
Going to college was another huge life transition, and my eating disorder did not handle that life transition that well. I found myself in another relapse, which I think looking back, probably happened, like I said, because I was trying to shortcut actually addressing my eating disorder. And because I didn’t go full-in on treatment the first time, it led to my eating disorder resurging.
Chris Sandel: There was something you said earlier that I want to highlight because I think it’s really important. You said “It was when I had to start challenging my eating disorder that I realised it was such a problem.”
I think this is such a big thing. When you’re saying, “Hey, I’m doing healthy eating and I think healthy eating’s great” and you’re just doing all the things that are basically eating disorder aligned, and you’re saying, “This is the way I want to live” – it’s hard to notice that there’s a problem, because you’re not knocking up against anything. It’s only when you’re like, “And now I want to go and challenge myself, now I want to eat X food” or “I want to have X number of rest days a week”, and this is doing something that is in opposition to the eating disorder, that you suddenly realize “Oh okay, I’m not in the driver’s seat in the way that I think I am.”
Eva Merrell: 100%. That was a defining factor for a lot of my recovery journey. I faced a lot of programme stuff and therapy stuff that really, really challenged me, and I struggled with that because I was not in control.
Chris Sandel: What was going on in terms of the coaching at this point? With the swim coaching, all throughout this, were your coaches raising red flags or concerned? And then when you did come back to start swimming again, was it taken on board, “This is your history, we need to do something different because this is your history”? How was this dealt with from a coaching perspective?
Eva Merrell: My club coach when I was in California did not ever raise concerns. He saw more of the symptom side. He was always asking me why I was so tired. I had a lot of mood struggles. I would be very anxious and very sad and very upset because I couldn’t train the way I wanted to because I was so malnourished – which I didn’t know at the time, but I do now. So he addressed those concerns, like “Why are you so tired?” I would tell him, “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
But then when I left club swimming in California and came to Georgia, I had told my head coach that I was diagnosed with an eating disorder, and they connected me with a full treatment team before I got to campus as a freshman. So I had a doctor, a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, and a therapist who all worked together to oversee my care when I was at the university.
Chris Sandel: Is that because you were a National Swim Team hopeful, or because you were on a scholarship? Is that offered to everyone who’s at Georgia University, or could be offered to anyone at Georgia University if they have a history of an eating disorder?
Eva Merrell: I’m pretty sure my treatment team would be available to any athlete at the university. It was all athletics-based. Through the Athletic Association, they had their own staff. They did have to refer out to an eating disorder therapist. She worked in tandem with the Athletic Association, but she wasn’t a staff member at UGA. So they do have a very robust and great programme for mental health needs and resources at the university. I was very lucky to be able to have that already in place.
Chris Sandel: How were you with talking about this with people outside of your team? This could be still when you’re at school, and then when you went to university. Did your friends know? Did no-one know? What was this like in terms of you talking about it?
Eva Merrell: When I finally accepted that I had an eating disorder, I tried to have it be the best-kept secret I ever had. I wanted no-one to know. And that came from a lot of shame and embarrassment that I felt around it. I think it was mainly my family and my coaching staff and really need-to-know type of basis. That was back in 2018, so there was still a lot of unknowns around eating disorders and stigmas and stereotypes. I was really scared of having that affect people’s perception of me. So I kept it very secretive.
00:42:48
Chris Sandel: I’m also thinking about social media and the impact that it could have. I’m 41; you’re 23, so there’s a big age gap. I’ve commented on the podcast many times before, I wouldn’t want to be a teenager in this day and age. I hated so many aspects of school, and we were at the very early stages of the internet. There was no social media, there was none of this in the mid-’90s. How much was that also having an impact on you and connected to all of this?
Eva Merrell: Social media, growing up with it is really tough. I will say it kind of goes back to what I was talking about before, where my body type was just different. I wanted so badly to be the type of girl that I saw on Instagram. When I would go to the gym – this was in high school – I would do extra workouts on top of swimming. I’d go to the gym and go on the elliptical and I’d watch runway shows of high fashion runway models, and I’d dream of looking like that. Which is so sad, because my body type was so good for swimming. It was built the way that I was meant to be. But on social media, I saw this different body type and I wanted to be like it so bad.
But connecting it to my eating disorder, especially when I reached recovery and weight restoration, man, social media was hard. I did not want to be in any pictures. My whole mindset changed because I was changing. My body was changing, and it was really, really tough.
Chris Sandel: It’s really interesting to hear you say “I was looking at fashion models on Instagram or watching that while I was at the gym” because undoubtedly there would’ve been people who were looking at you, thinking, “Wow, she’s swimming so quickly, she’s potentially heading to the Olympics. That is my dream. Why doesn’t my body match up to her body?” It’s that thing of totals all the way down. Everyone has that experience of looking at someone else and thinking, “Gosh, why can’t I have that thing that that person has?”
Eva Merrell: Yeah, and I even do that with myself. I will see pictures of myself from these times of my life and I’ll think, ‘Why did I ever look at myself and think such negative things?” Because now I can see with clear eyes. I just wish I could’ve had my mindset that I do now back then. It just is so easy to wish for what you don’t have. But like you said, you made a great point: yeah, someone could’ve been looking at me, or I could look at someone else and see something that they don’t see. It’s so subjective.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think eating disorders are multifactorial and there’s many driving factors. You’ve already touched on a number of them. But are there other things we haven’t talked about that you think were pushing you towards this or made you more susceptible to this?
Eva Merrell: I don’t know. I personally like to think that just my personality – and I don’t know if there’s any science behind this, but I think my personality as a kid, I was so introverted, so shy, like I said, picky eater. And one of the main driving things is anxiety. I’ve had anxiety my whole entire life, and I think my anxious nature was a huge underlying factor in the development of my eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: There is research around this about the fact that personality type and genetic traits connected to either sensitivity or anxiety are very much linked to an eating disorder. This is something I talk about a lot with clients; I think eating disorders are anxiety disorders. I had Sasha Gorrell on the podcast. I’ll link to it in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen to that. We talked about this for a whole episode, about the fact that eating disorders are anxiety disorders.
And the thing with all anxiety disorders is it’s about avoidance, and the thing that helps all anxiety disorders is exposure, which is doing the thing that you’re scared of. That’s why eating disorder treatment – yes, it’s about nutritional rehabilitation, and that’s a really important part – and it’s also about doing the thing that you’re afraid of and doing it enough and doing it in the right way, with the right support, etc., so that you get to a place where either “That thing doesn’t scare me anymore” or “That thing still makes me uncomfortable, and I also know that I can do it even when that uncomfortable feeling is still here.”
Eva Merrell: You saying that brought me back to so many times when I felt that. That’s something that I think I opposed, but now I really appreciate that I went through that, exposing myself to all of these things for such a long time that I was so fearful of that now I’m able to sit here and be so much more open-minded and so much less fearful.
00:48:55
Chris Sandel: In terms of your story, at the point you’ve got up to, you’ve gone off to university; you’re then having this relapse at that point. Then what happens from there?
Eva Merrell: This part of my story is probably one of the most tumultuous times. I went to university and started relapsing in my first semester. It was a way quicker relapse than the beginning stages of my eating disorder. I lost a significant amount of weight and was engaging in behaviours and things that I am not proud of today, but I realise that it was a direct result of my eating disorder. I came home for Christmas break and was kind of knocking at death’s door, to put it bluntly. My body was just so broken down, and it couldn’t sustain itself.
I went back into the hospital for five weeks, and that hospital stay was way different for me because it was at a different programme than I was at the first time, and it was very sobering to sit in the hospital and realise how awful my health was at that point in life. That more than anything was the biggest wake-up call that I experienced with my eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: Wake-up call for what reason? I know that sounds like a dumb question, but what was it about that?
Eva Merrell: Just realising that my eating disorder could 100% kill me if I kept living my life the way that I was. I think before, I was like, “Yeah, eating disorders are dangerous”, I knew they were dangerous, but I felt like it would never happen to me. I felt like, “I’ll never be one to die from it” or “I’ll never be that bad.” Then when I went to the hospital that time, I was like, oh my gosh, it did happen to me. It is that bad. It really shifted how I thought about addressing it and how I thought about taking it on in terms of recovering.
It was just such a heartbreaking experience, thinking about it now, for me and my family and everyone.
Chris Sandel: I think there is so much grief around eating disorders and eating disorder recovery. It is one of the emotions that comes up a lot connected to this.
Eva Merrell: Grief in so many different ways. I’ve experienced grieving so much within my journey. Looking back now, when I was in my eating disorder, really in the thick of it, I didn’t have regard for what my supporting people in my life were going through, like how it affected my parents, how it affected my siblings. I just wasn’t in the mind frame to think about that. But man, eating disorders are hard for loved ones, to see other people suffer with it. I have so much love and respect for my family for fighting the fight with me when it was really bad.
00:52:35
Chris Sandel: In tangible terms, what happened from here? You said it felt like this galvanised you to say “I’m going to take on my recovery”, so what did that then look like?
Eva Merrell: It looked like going back to UCSD Eating Disorder Center, but I was in the adult programme, which was so much better suited for me because it was up to me. All of the decisions I made, it was my doing, what I wanted to accomplish. I think I accepted it. I was like, “I have these five months to do nothing else but address this eating disorder.” I was going to weight restore and I was going to do it.
My weight restoration goal and my calorie intake each day was just astronomical, but I had to take it day by day and go, whatever I was doing before in my eating disorder, I had to accept that it was not what was best for me. Despite how loud my eating disorder was, it just wasn’t.
So I did another round of treatment. And my recovery journey is way longer than that, because that was back in 2019. Obviously it didn’t just end there with a nice little bow. [laughs] But that was my last time in treatment, and ever since that treatment stay, I’ve been able to move through recovery at an outpatient level.
Chris Sandel: I think the thing that stands out for me there is you talking about “I then took responsibility. I started to choose this.” I think that really does make all the difference. Yes, you can give someone more energy, and yes, they can have that have an impact on them in terms of that has an impact on their physiology. But if they aren’t choosing that and they don’t want it, it is just “I am counting down the days until I’m out of here and I get to do the things that I want to be able to do.”
So yeah, I’m a huge advocate of you need nutritional rehabilitation. Hands down the most important thing as part of recovery. Everything else pales in comparison. And someone needs to also be choosing that, that that is what they’re doing.
Eva Merrell: Yes. I have a lot of athletes and younger people that reach out to me sometimes, and they ask about advice for treatment or for eating disorders, and I always tell them it has to come from you, at the end of the day. Your parents could want it for you, your coaches could want it for you, but I just don’t think you can find true recovery, and you can’t strive for true recovery, unless you have that desire to do it from within.
Chris Sandel: I agree. And this isn’t to say that any parent should say, “Well, they can just do what they want to do.” If I was a parent, I would be wanting to do the family-based treatment. I would be wanting to do everything in my power to try and support my child with this – and at the same time, knowing that things really only stick when that person decides, “Okay, I’m going to do this.”
Eva Merrell: 100%.
00:56:23
Chris Sandel: What then happened after that in terms of swimming?
Eva Merrell: Swimming was still on the table, which honestly is wild to think about. I probably should’ve stopped way sooner to deal with my eating disorder, but I was determined to swim and went back to swim for my sophomore year. A month into sophomore year, September, it was a couple weeks before what was going to be my first competition and I actually tore my ACL. A little bit of plot twist to my trajectory.
The combination of two years of eating disorder treatment plus now facing surgery and rehab for an ACL, I kind of took that as the opportunity to look at my life and say swimming wasn’t what was best for me anymore. Which was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, because my eating disorder – connecting it back to what we were talking about with anxiety, I think my eating disorder really started to gear up because I had anxiety about my performance and about my preparation. I didn’t have a lot of trust in the training I was doing, so it led me to focus on my eating.
And because my eating disorder was so tied and intertwined with swimming, I think I needed to step back from swimming to fully recover and address my eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: We’ll get on to this in terms of – Victoria Garrick is the person who set up The Hidden Opponent, and I watched her TED Talk, and she talks about in that the difference between a physical injury and a mental health injury, and how those things are viewed differently. I wonder even if they were viewed differently for you, where if I give up swimming because of an eating disorder, that feels very different to me giving up swimming because I’ve done my ACL and there’s now this physical thing that is tied to this. I don’t know, it feels more legitimate or it just feels different.
Eva Merrell: It’s so funny you mention that because I think there’s a lot of truth to it. When I tore my ACL, I think it helped me that I could medically retire because of my eating disorder. As much as I would love to say it was because of my ACL, I definitely could’ve rehabbed the ACL and moved on and swam. But it was just the right time for me to say, with how my life had gone the last couple years, it gave me the motivation to make that step.
Chris Sandel: How at peace are you with that decision and how things did turn out in terms of swimming? I can imagine there could be a lot of regret about this, and also there’s like “This is now opening up my life to all these other possibilities”, so how do you think about this?
Eva Merrell: I have no regrets. My journey post-swimming was very up and down. I had surgery for my ACL, which began my full recovery journey in terms of physical and mental. I went through a grieving period, which is what I call it. I call it my swimming grieving period, where I allowed myself to be super bummed out. Because there was no way around it. There was no way to shortcut the sadness that came along with losing the sport and missing out on all of the dreams and goals that I’d set for myself.
Then I went on a little bit of a rollercoaster ride with my eating disorder recovery and journey. I had to learn how to fuel myself again, because I wasn’t swimming. I struggled with emotional eating and then the binge-restrict cycle. I had to navigate all these little, tiny nuances to my recovery. But ultimately, it all led me to where I am today, which is I still pay very close attention to making sure I’m eating enough, because that’s very important for me. I have to be somewhat regimented and make sure I’m eating consistently and enough.
But I’m discovering intuitive eating and learning how to listen to my body, and all of those things I wouldn’t have been able to do if I didn’t experience the more negative side of, like I said, binge-restrict and emotional eating. Because it gave me the opportunity to work through a lot of thoughts and emotions.
Chris Sandel: I wonder, as well – you talk about discovering intuitive eating and listening to your body. I love the fact that that’s where you’re at and how different that may have been – and you tell me what your experience was like – to your training, that “I’m feeling tired” – well, you just push through, or “I feel sore” – okay, you just push through – where actually, it’s “I don’t listen to my body”?
Eva Merrell: It’s so different. Like I said, it’s time that adjusted me to all of it. With swimming, in every aspect of my life you had to be extremely disciplined and regimented and you had to have a plan. That definitely carried over into my recovery, where for years and years, I lived my life following meal plans from my dietitian and I was super regimented because I was afraid of falling into a place of relapse.
But now, I’m starting to realise it’s okay for me, where I’m at now – if I want to go have a big lunch, I don’t have to feel confined to have a snack. I can play around with how I eat and what I eat because I trust my brain, and I think my brain trusts my body. And all of those inner workings, there’s just so much more trust within myself to make those decisions. Which is so liberating. I never thought that I would get to a place where I could make these kind of free decisions around food.
Chris Sandel: That is so lovely to hear. And it takes time to get there. I think if you tried to do this early on, it’s a recipe for disaster because you’re just not getting good quality feedback from your body, or your ability to discern the information that you’re getting back is so messed up. When you’ve known true stomach-gnawing hunger, anything less than that feels like “I’m not hungry.” So it’s either a 0 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10, and then there’s nothing else in between.
It does, as you say, take time for you to be able to build up your nuancing ability of discerning these different things.
Eva Merrell: Yes, and I think, like you mentioned, when I was really deep into my eating disorder, I had no hunger cues. My body was so out of tune that if I would’ve tried to pursue any level of intuitive eating, I wouldn’t have been able to because my body would’ve told me I wasn’t hungry. Which is super dangerous. So I think more than anything, I needed to ensure that my body was healed hormonally and physically to where it could tell me what it felt and I could listen to it.
01:05:03
Chris Sandel: What about the identity piece? I have so many clients or people I speak to who exercise is a big part of their life, and they’re part of the ultra-running community or they’re part of the tennis community and tennis is a whole big part of their life. Clearly, there are benefits to this sense of community, but it’s also based around an activity that is problematic because of their eating disorder. How did you navigate moving away from swimming and losing this part of your identity and maybe losing friends? What happened and how did you navigate it?
Eva Merrell: I definitely experienced a lot of that. Definitely lost friends, lost swimming. Lot of loss. But I made this decision during COVID – because my retirement aligned with COVID – I just allowed myself to not do any type of exercise. I was like, if there’s going to be a time in my life where I could explore not exercising, it is right now. I probably went six months. And I’d do walks and I’d do very low-intensity and joyful movement, but nothing that I would’ve previously considered exercise.
And I know not everyone would think this is a great idea, but taking a long break from exercise was such a good perspective adjustment for me. It changed how I viewed exercise and what I wanted to do. I had time to pursue other passions. I joined a church and I found my faith, and I spent time with friends and family, which is something I hadn’t done in years and years. Stopping movement allowed me to find other avenues of community and passion that weren’t connected to exercise.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I’m glad to hear that, and I would second that. That is something that I often recommend and work on with clients: having a period of break, I think for all the reasons that you listed, as well as so often, exercise is how I cope, how I deal with my emotions. And again, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but if that’s someone’s go-to and really their only way, then I think it is a problem, especially if someone has a tendency to develop an eating disorder.
So having that clean break where, as you say, you had six months where you weren’t doing that, it means that you really do start to develop other coping skills.
Eva Merrell: That’s a great point. I 100% developed so many different coping skills. I learned to lean on my support system more, and that was the biggest thing. Where before, I would turn to my eating disorder or I would turn to exercise, I started to just talk to people and seek support and advice from loved ones. It was a really, really valued time for me in terms of my recovery, those six months.
Chris Sandel: Prior to this –I don’t know, maybe when you were 15 or 17 – if you were introducing yourself, how quickly did ‘I’m a swimmer’ come up? How much was your identity based around this?
Eva Merrell: Oh, it was everything and more a part of my identity. If there was a number greater than 100%, it would’ve been that. I didn’t do anything else besides swimming. I hate to say it, but I didn’t even really care about school because I just thought I wanted to be this amazing swimmer. I was 100% just a swimmer that whole time, and while I don’t necessarily – well, that’s a lie. I do regret that, but I just don’t think I was in a position to challenge it or change it back in the day. It was what it was back then. But now, it’s so cool to not just be one thing. It’s cool to have many different sides of my identity.
Chris Sandel: I’m not in the world of elite athletes, especially athletes who are looking at going to the Olympics; I don’t know how realistic it is for someone to be in the Olympics and say “I have a really well-balanced, well-rounded life.” I don’t know if those two things are compatible.
Eva Merrell: I agree. I think at a certain stage they’re not compatible. What I have reflected on is when I was 15 to 17, I was trying to live the life of an athlete who was like 26. I always tell any parent that I talk to, as long as your kid is under 18, I would strive to live as balanced of a life as possible. I know there’s definitely discrepancies here and there, but – because when you’re 18 and you go to college, then you can dive head in to your sport. You are an adult. You have more time. I just think it’s super important for high school and middle school aged athletes to try to keep some sense of normalcy.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting; I reflect on my growing up, and I played sport all through school. Never at any great level of like I’m going to make a national team or anything along those lines. It was always just fun. Yeah, it was always just fun. We would train maybe once a week, maybe twice a week. We’d then play on the weekend, one game on the weekend, and that was it. I don’t know if it’s just the level that you got to or actually there’s been a shift, but it feels like there is this shift where if you’re going to play sport, you then end up dedicating 20 hours a week to this thing as opposed to “Oh yeah, I play a little bit of football” or “I play a little bit of cricket” or “I play a little bit of rugby” or whatever it may be and that’s just it.
Eva Merrell: There is a huge, huge shift, I think, of early specialisation sport, but then also just trying to pursue a level of sport and of practice that is so unattainable for a young person. I totally would recommend – if you want to practice every day, I think that’s totally fine. But I lived a lifestyle where I wouldn’t go to school dances and I wouldn’t hang out with friends and go get food late at night because I was super regimented. If I could tell my younger self, I’d be like, yeah, skip a couple practices. Go get some cheeseburgers at night and go to a school dance. All of those things are so fun, and it definitely would’ve prevented burnout. I think those things prevent burnout for a lot of young athletes.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. It’s interesting. There’s a book called Range by – I think it’s David Epstein. Have you come across that?
Eva Merrell: I haven’t.
Chris Sandel: His big thing is talking about the benefits of having a range of activities that you do. The first chapter compares Tiger Woods, who is this phenomenal golfer who from age – I don’t know, as soon as he could walk he was picking up a golf club. His dad was a fanatical golfer, and he would play golf smashing the ball into the garage door where they put a mat up. Tiger Woods was always on the path to being a phenomenal golfer, and all he ever did was play golf. It’s no surprise with his talent, plus the amount that he trained, that he got there. And then he compares it to Roger Federer, who is a phenomenal tennis player, Tiger Woods’s equal in tennis, and yet Federer played all these different sports. It wasn’t until much later that he then narrowed down and was like “Tennis is my thing.”
The book makes this example in all of these different areas, whether it’s playing an instrument, critical thinking, how important it is not just to get your 10,000 hours, but to have all of these extra areas that help in terms of quality of life. He looked at the people who were winning Nobel Prizes in science, how many of them were also painters or artists, and how all of these things meld together to make it really – just how helpful all of these things are. It’s definitely something I’ve taken on board.
Eva Merrell: I love that. That’s a super interesting perspective. I didn’t know that about Roger Federer. It reminded me of Michael Phelps. He was more aligned with Tiger Woods, where he was a swimmer through and through. But there are so many different paths to excellence. There are so many different paths to success, and I think that’s often forgotten in sport.
Chris Sandel: I think the other part is maybe there are some sports where you have to do that if you’re going to be the Michael Phelps, and that’s not why everyone is playing sport.
Eva Merrell: Exactly.
Chris Sandel: It can be very much like “I just enjoy doing this thing; I don’t need to be training 30 hours a week.”
Eva Merrell: Yes, 100%.
01:15:37
Chris Sandel: I know you’re currently pursuing a master’s degree in sports management and policy at Georgia. Was that what you were already studying before you retired, or was there a change in direction?
Eva Merrell: There was a change in direction. I took my newfound freedom of not being tied down to sport for a lot of time and really turned that into a love of what I was studying and a love of academics. Georgia has a great programme where you can do your undergrad degree and your master’s degree in five years, so I’m towards the tail end of that path. They have a sport management degree which combines my love of school and my love of sport, and it’s been super gratifying and really fun.
Chris Sandel: Is this also how you then became connected with The Hidden Opponent?
Eva Merrell: Becoming connected to The Hidden Opponent was more of a personal thing. I followed Victoria for a while, and when she launched The Hidden Opponent back in 2019, I had submitted my story to be shared on their Instagram. Then when they were launching our Campus Captains programme, they were looking for athletes to lead the groups that were being set up, so I applied to be a head. That’s how I met everyone there, and I now work on the leadership side. I do social media and outreach stuff like that. It’s been I think almost three years now that I’ve been with them.
Chris Sandel: Nice. If we take a step back, for listeners who are unaware of The Hidden Opponent, can you talk about what it is?
Eva Merrell: Of course. Like you said, Victoria Garrick did this TED Talk. It was called like ‘Facing the Hidden Opponent’. She took that TED Talk that got a lot of views and a lot of traction and turned it into this nonprofit where our mission is to give support and to advocate and to educate student athletes, and really all sport professionals, about mental health and how to break the stigma in athletics. Mental health in athletics has been such a hush-hush topic; no-one really wanted to talk about it. It wasn’t a really respected topic to even engage in in sport, and it’s just now in the last I would say five years that it’s being talked about and people are paying more attention to the mental health of athletes.
Victoria created it, and Leeann Passaro is our Chief Operating Officer, and they created a Campus Captains programme where we now have I think over 800 university students who are athletes that advocate on behalf of The Hidden Opponent, which is so amazing. I think we’re so lucky to have athletes who want to break the stigma.
Chris Sandel: Nice. When she set this up – I know Phelps has done a documentary about his mental health struggles, especially post-Olympics. Had that already come out, or was that after this?
Eva Merrell: Are you talking about The Weight of Gold?
Chris Sandel: Yes.
Eva Merrell: I’m pretty sure The Weight of Gold came out a few years later. But that was a great documentary.
Chris Sandel: It’s still on my to-watch list. I haven’t been able to see it. I’ve seen the trailer and I knew he’s done it, and I’ve heard him on podcasts talking about it.
Eva Merrell: Yeah. The Weight of Gold was later, but Victoria actually had a great opportunity to connect with Kobe Bryant before he passed, and they were connected and we were listed as a resource in his book Geese Are Never Swans, which is a mental health book. I definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to read it. But she had that great connection with Kobe, and Kobe was a champion of mental health as well.
So we’ve definitely grown a lot in the last couple years, and I think we will keep growing because mental health in sport continues to be a growing topic. I think people are more and more invested in helping student athletes find resources and education about a variety of mental health topics.
01:20:21
Chris Sandel: I wanted to go through a couple of things that Victoria Garrick mentioned in her TED Talk, because I watched it and I thought it was great and also really relevant to what we’re talking about today, but I could see how she then went and set up The Hidden Opponent. She talked about her schedule at school and showed how full her load is and was. She plays volleyball and she was talking about how she played volleyball and then she’d have these classes and showed what her week looked like, and it was just so jampacked. She said, “I was just so depleted”, and then later comments, “And I told myself I was weak for needing a break.”
I think this really struck me, because I think so much of mental health is from being depleted and not getting the downtime and the space and the rest that is needed. And this is true whether you’re a college student, but it can also be true with the mom who’s got three kids who’s still trying to make it to CrossFit classes three times a week or five times a week or whatever. There is so much going on, and the body is just not getting the rest that it needs, and the mind is just not getting the rest that it needs.
Eva Merrell: It’s great that Victoria mentioned oftentimes we feel guilty for needing that break, because – kind of tying in social media – there’s so much of a hustle culture where people are praised and lifted up if they are absolutely jampacking their schedule and accomplishing so many things. Especially in the athletic space, you’re prescribed this schedule at college of school and swim and rehab and all of the different meetings you need. If you need a break, I think people kind of look at you funny. They’re like, “What do you mean you need a break? This is what you do.”
It’s so important to mention that each individual, each athlete, is different. I think that’s something that might be missing from the athletic culture. Even though there is this set schedule and set mould for success at universities, there should be wiggle room for athletes who need a break, who need a different schedule, who have different needs. It’s so important to honour that.
Chris Sandel: Also, when I was looking at it, I was like, she’s training like a professional athlete – but a professional athlete, that is their job and that’s all they’re doing. They’re not then doing five days of university on top of that as well.
Eva Merrell: Unless you’re in the thick of it, in the student athlete role, it’s really hard to grasp how intense the day to day is. Especially at Georgia, a lot of colleges – I mean, hopefully colleges would pursue this, but the student athletes, you have to be academically disciplined. So just as much as you’re putting effort and dedication into your sport, you have to be putting that much dedication into your academics. Which is a tough load to carry with both sides of your life.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And I think there are some sports where you can maybe make the case for “If I can put up with this, then I can make a really good living and I’m set for life”, and then there’s other sports where it’s like, this is never going to go anywhere apart from you absolutely loving this thing. There is no financial windfall at the end of this for you.
Eva Merrell: Yeah, that’s a great point. I’m taking a sport law class right now, and we talk a lot about that with college athletes with football and basketball. A lot of athletes view college as a stepping stone to professional life, which is kind of the way it is, but for so many other student athletes, they’re pursuing their sport in college because it’s what they love to do and it is the final journey in this long road of sport, and that’s why it’s so important to give resources and support to these kids who are just doing it out of the love of their hearts, and they’re so passionate about it.
Chris Sandel: There’s the Netflix documentary Cheer. Did you watch that at all?
Eva Merrell: I did. I don’t know if I watched all of it, but I have seen a few episodes.
Chris Sandel: I have really mixed feelings about that, because I can tell that these people really love cheering and love this – and they are just being trained and overtrained, to the point where they’re getting lifelong injuries. There was a part of me that’s like, for what? Yes, you love this thing, and I get that. And at age 21 to something, that is permanent, that means you’re unable to walk properly for the rest of your life, I just – it felt like these people were very dispensable and that the person who was running this thing was really wanting to win the medals and take the accolades and all of that, and these kids were just pawns to be able to do this.
Eva Merrell: Yeah, and that’s an interesting topic because that’s how I felt when I retired. I could’ve kept swimming and my eating disorder probably would’ve kept coming back, and I felt like, for what? Why would I keep swimming if it meant that my eating disorder was going to be with me for even longer? I didn’t want to pursue that path. I think a lot of student athletes put their bodies, they put their health absolutely on the line in pursuit of excellence. You see it especially with football. The information and awfulness about CTE and what multiple concussions can do to the body – it’s a really, really tough topic to try to balance playing your sport but also protecting your future.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it is. There are no easy answers with any of these things. I think about the things that were important to me when I was younger, and now how I think about them differently, and I do wonder if there is a lot of that, of like, wow, I really pushed myself when I was super younger, and now as I’m older, I wish maybe that wasn’t so encouraged or I took a different path.
Eva Merrell: I think a lot of people might find themselves in that scenario. I know I think that way about myself when I was a teenager. I wish I didn’t push myself as hard as I did. But the only way you can really avoid that is by keeping good people around you, and hopefully your coaches and support staff have your best interest at heart and not just your athletic best interest, if that makes sense.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I know from just going through The Hidden Opponent content that it’s not just aimed at the student athletes; it’s also aimed at the coaching staff.
Eva Merrell: I think it was within this last year we rolled out a coaches and professionals programme where monthly, our staff will do Zoom calls with different professionals, whether it be mental health professionals, therapists, nutritionists, athletic trainers or coaches, and they talk about programming that’s relevant to them and how they can support themselves and how they can support their student athletes. Because as much as student athletes can advocate on their own behalf, a lot of the times it takes coaches getting on board to change the culture within a program to be more conducive to healthy mental habits.
Chris Sandel: Also, as the student athlete, you are just one person. As the coach, you’re seeing many people, and the coach has hopefully been doing this for many, many years. Like if I’m thinking about your story, a coach who is well-versed in eating disorders and maybe some of the early signs of it, this could’ve been picked up earlier, and as the role of the coach, having that knowledge to pass on to the person who this is their first time dealing with this thing, so they didn’t know to look out for these red flags.
Eva Merrell: It’s so great that you mention that, because I believe that through and through. If people around me in my athletic spaces were more well-versed on mental health and eating disorders, I for sure would like to think that I would’ve sought intervention at an earlier stage.
I think that even the coaches at Georgia, with my scenario, they’re probably very – when it comes to eating disorders, just having the experience of seeing athletes go through something and learning about it only better serves athletes in the future who might be dealing with it.
01:30:17
Chris Sandel: Another thing that Victoria shares in her TED Talk was she pulled up a number of her old social media posts, and they were posts of her in photos with her friends and they’re laughing and having a fun time, and then she explained what was really going on with each of them and how inaccurate they were. One, she stayed at that party for five minutes and then left because she had anxiety. Another one, they took 50 of the photos so she could find the right one where she felt she looked good enough to actually post it. Another one, I think she said she spent the entirety of the evening in tears. Just this mismatch between what is shown on social media and what’s going on in someone’s life.
Eva Merrell: Yeah, and that is rampant today in social media. I think we now, more than ever, have so much access into people’s lives, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. I think for a majority, people only want to share the good. It’s really hard and vulnerable to want to share the bad with a public platform. Which is totally understandable. But I think when athletes and really just people in general consume social media, you need to go into it with the expectation that you’re only seeing a fraction of that person’s life and that person’s story.
I mean, I did that during treatment. I think like three weeks or a month after I got out of the hospital, I posted this picture with my sister and I was like, “I love my sister!” You would never know what I was going through just by looking at that one image.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. And I know you could meet up with your friend and say, “How are you doing?” and they’re like, “Oh, everything’s fine.” But it’s different to a picture that is very curated – or not even just curated; it gives you the tiniest fraction of a snapshot, whereas if you were with your friend and they said everything’s fine and you spent two hours with them, you’re still getting a little bit of a semblance of what’s going on, and there’s more depth to that, even if someone is still not being fully honest of what’s going on, than the depth that you get from a picture.
Eva Merrell: Yeah. I always say in my life, you never know what another person is going through, which is why it’s so important to pursue kindness and respect and empathy. With mental health, some people hold their struggles very well, and you wouldn’t be able to know that they’re struggling by looking at them or by talking to them. With social media and just life, it’s just so important to not assume that someone is doing well just because they look like it, because a lot of people tend to struggle in silence.
01:33:22
Chris Sandel: One of the other things, when I was reading on The Hidden Opponent blog – people talking about injuries really turning into a downward spiral. In your story, the ACL was this perfect thing that gave you a get out clause of like “Great, I’m going to exit.” And I’m not minimising what you went through, because I know there were still ups and downs with it, but reading some of the other blog posts about this, that being a really tough time for the student athletes.
Eva Merrell: Yeah. Just like we talked about how my identity was in swimming and it was rocked by my eating disorder and stepping away, I think athletes struggle with injury because injury can take you out of your sport, and then they’re faced with “Okay, I can’t play my sport for a season or for a year” or whatever it may be, and they’re not equipped to deal with that kind of loss of sport.
And then we see so many athletes who have recurring injuries or chronic injuries, and they’re so passionate and they love their sport, but they don’t know how to fight through the pain and the constant ins and outs of playing. It leads, I think, to a lot of sadness and depression and anxiety because I think a lot of athletes sometimes feel failed by their bodies that they’re injured.
Chris Sandel: I can definitely understand that, and I also think there’s probably a lot of athletes who are similar to you, where they’re dealing with an eating disorder that no-one knows about. If you get an injury and you’re now no longer able to do X number of hours of training every day or week or whatever, that’s a huge blow.
Eva Merrell: Yeah. I’ve known some athletes at Georgia who struggle with that, and that’s where Georgia’s great because you can meet with a nutritionist who can help you through an injury perspective of fuelling yourself. But I would like to say not every school has the luxury to have staff members that can do that for you, so sometimes athletes are left to fend for themselves and try to figure out that struggle alone, which is so heartbreaking.
Chris Sandel: I think when you’re talking about that in terms of negotiating with a dietitian, someone’s already at a certain level when you’re able to do that. If the losing of sport or exercise is the point where you’ve not told anyone about your eating disorder, you don’t even necessarily consider it an eating disorder, it’s just this coping mechanism, then everything just falls apart. It’s so much more difficult to deal with that than the tweaking that you’re talking about.
Eva Merrell: For sure.
Chris Sandel: What about burnout? I know this is another topic that is talked about a lot on the site. Talk about that with athletes.
Eva Merrell: I think there’s two things that really can contribute to burnout. One is like I mentioned earlier; if you don’t have enough balance in your life, you’re going to get burnout. As true as Victoria’s recount of an athlete’s schedule is, I do think there are very small and easy ways to incorporate balance into your life, and a lot of that comes from boundary setting, which is a hard skill to learn as an athlete. So I think balance is number one for preventing burnout or at least mitigating the risk of burnout.
And you need to have other avenues of your life besides your sport that bring you joy. I think that’s the crux of it. If all you do is care about your sport and all you do is eat, sleep, and breathe your sport, there’s going to come a day where you’re like, “I physically and mentally cannot do that anymore.” Whereas if you have a standing Saturday coffee date and you go to a youth group or you take a painting class, you have little pockets of peace in your life that can take the load off of you that sport can have.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. One, your identity isn’t solely in this thing, and two, you know how to spend your time in other ways. Otherwise it’s ‘I’ve got this one thing’. And this isn’t just about sport; if your work is the one and only thing that you put all of your time and effort into, then that’s also going to be pretty fragile. There needs to be other things going on as opposed to just banking on this one thing.
Eva Merrell: I will also say, also a very uncommon thing to do in sport, but taking a break. I think that it is total okay for athletes to go to their coaching staff and say, “I need a week to go be with my family and to rest and recharge.” Sometimes I think athletes don’t realise that all they might need is just a little bit of time off, and they’d feel so much better. I really recommend for athletes, at the end of the season or maybe after a big competition, take a few days. Don’t exercise. Don’t do sport-specific activity. Just rest and recharge. I think that’s super important and gratifying in terms of rebalancing yourself and getting mentally ready to go into the next phase of training or whatever it may be.
Chris Sandel: I think that is also a good test to see how much you’re in the driving seat. If you have an opportunity to take time off and you feel incapable of doing so, that’s probably telling you something.
Eva Merrell: Oh, for sure. I remember times of my life where I was leery to take time off. But again, I think a common theme is it comes with time. I think for anyone struggling with their identity or an eating disorder or mental health or whatever it may be, you have to learn. You have to learn how to let your mind come to different pathways and think differently and learn how to take a break. It won’t just happen overnight. It’s a process.
Chris Sandel: I totally agree. It is a practice, and one that you need to do again and again to get good at doing and for it to feel very normal to do so.
Eva Merrell: Yeah.
01:40:44
Chris Sandel: The final question I have for you – in your bio on The Hidden Opponent, it says, “After college, Eva hopes to work in student athlete development at the collegiate or national level.” What would you like to bring to a role like this that is missing? How would you like to improve things?
Eva Merrell: That’s a great question. Georgia actually has this programme called The Georgia Way. It’s basically you take anything outside of sport and they are going to help you with it. So career development, mental health, just all of these different areas of life that encompass a student athlete, they provide support. I would love to be in a role where I could give curriculum and programming and help to student athletes in areas outside of their sport. Especially at the collegiate level, career services is a huge thing. Setting athletes up for their first step after sport is just astronomically important in my mind.
I’d love to do that kind of work. I’d love to keep working around mental health, try to establish better care, better resources for student athletes that are struggling. I think I have a very strong passion of giving back to student athletes – obviously because I can relate to them on a very personal level, and one thing I said – I did a little speech at Georgia for National Eating Disorders Week a couple years ago, and one thing I say is I want to be the person that 15-year-old me could’ve had to look up to. I hope that one young girl or boy looks at me online or any of my videos and says, “Wow, I needed to know that. That’s so great to hear”, because that’s one thing I was missing when I was a teenager.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I do think the landscape has changed, and there is probably more available than when you were a teenager, and I’m glad that you are trying to be that person as well.
Eva Merrell: Thank you.
Chris Sandel: This has been wonderful. Where can people go if they want to find out either more about you, but also The Hidden Opponent?
Eva Merrell: I’m on Instagram. It’s just my name, @evamerrell. For The Hidden Opponent, you can find us on a variety of social platforms – Instagram, Twitter. We have a YouTube page where all of the coaches and professionals panels live, like I was talking about earlier. And you can find us at www.thehiddenopponent.org to read our blog. We have so many amazing athletes that are willing to share their stories with us, so you can find all of their stories there. A majority of our content lives on Instagram, and we also share a bunch of great stories and resources there.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. This has been awesome.
Eva Merrell: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Eva Merrell. She is a great ambassador for eating disorder recovery and mental health in sport, and she and The Hidden Opponent are really doing great work. So if you’re interested, then check out the links mentioned in the show and in the show notes.
01:44:12
I have a recommendation for you, and it’s a podcast interview. I was speaking to a friend recently, and she asked me if I had any podcast suggestions. This was the first thing that came to mind. It’s an episode of Armchair Expert, which is Dax Shepard’s podcast, and it’s him interviewing the actress Anna Kendrick.
In the interview, Anna opens up about her time in an abusive relationship, the recent death of her father, her anxiety, the therapy that she’s been doing. As you can tell, this isn’t a light episode, but what stood out for me with this were two things. One was Anna’s vulnerability and openness to share – and this wasn’t her talking about this stuff for five minutes and then moving on to easier topics. This was pretty much the entirety of the episode, of her being really open about her life and what’s been going on.
Then the second thing that stood out, and the reason why this happened in terms of her openness, was because of Dax. Not only do I think he is a masterful interviewer, he’s also an incredibly open and vulnerable human being. By his own admission, he sat in weekly AA meetings for 15 years or 17 years, so he’s had a lot of experience of being with people who are sharing raw parts of their life. This kind of felt like you were eavesdropping on a therapy session.
Armchair Expert really is the only podcast that I regularly listen to these days. I don’t listen to all of the episodes, but a good chunk of them are things that I will check out, and I honestly think that this is the perfect example of why. For me, Dax is incredible at making guests feel at ease and being able to hold space for true and authentic conversations. Armchair Expert is exclusive to Spotify, so you have to go there for listening to it; there are no episode numbers, but if you go to the show and search ‘Anna Kendrick’, it will come up. I’ll link to that as well in the show notes.
That is it for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, shortly I’m going to be starting up a new programme. It uses the same framework that I apply with clients, but in a group setting. The programme’s going to start in late May and run for 12 weeks. There are limited spots available, so if you’re interested, send an email to info@seven-health.com with the word ‘Group’ in the subject line and I can then send over further details.
That is it for this week. Next week I’m off for the week. Some of the time I’ll be in Lisbon, enjoying warmer weather and a friend’s music festival, but I will be back with a new episode soon. So take care of yourself and I’ll catch you then.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
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