Volleyball Bundesliga player Lea Ambrosius spoke publicly about her eating disorder for the first time in 2024. The 1.90 meter tall athlete starved herself to an almost life-threatening level of underweight, as she described to MDR. Your story is not an isolated case. Now other volleyball players dare to talk about their fate.
“I was a shell of myself”says Betty Lange. The 21-year-old volleyball player now plays as a middle blocker in the 2nd Bundesliga Pro for Bayer Volley Leverkusen. Sport was the focus from an early age and was the most important source of her self-esteem.
The Schweriner received invitations to the youth national team, but only got a limited playing time there. Comments about her body, that she was lanky and not very muscular, made her doubt herself and set off a spiral that drove her even deeper into an eating disorder.
Tall, slim, well trained
The classic image of a professional volleyball player is tall, slim and well trained. For a long time, the incentive was to look like successful volleyball players – as little fat as possible, as much muscle as possible. “In volleyball you have to be able to jump high, you have to be stamina. For that you need a slim build, but also muscles. This combination is difficult”explains Lange.
Along with the desire to be as slim as possible, she developed a compulsion to exercise. For hours workouts in addition to intensive volleyball training. The lowest point was her 16th birthday, when she was in the hospital because of her eating disorder: “That’s when I started thinking about what are you actually doing here. Looking back, it’s crazy that that wasn’t even enough to give me my life energy back.”
Reduce dead mass
As a game sport, volleyball is not directly one of the risk sports like weight class or endurance sports, but weight and jumping ability are directly related. “Useless weight” caused by fatty tissue, for example, can directly influence (jumping) performance. “Athletes always strive to reduce ‘dead mass’ because it simply improves performance.”says sports medicine doctor Dr. Petra Platen.
But this also increases the risk of developing an eating disorder because athletes are constantly in an area of tension, as Platen explains: “Many athletes are always confronted with the issue: I can’t weigh too much, I can’t have too much fat, because in many sports it has a negative impact on performance. But they also need enough food to achieve top performance.”
DVV sees no structural problem
There are no concrete figures regarding eating disorders in volleyball. “Since an eating disorder does not necessarily lead to unfitness for sports, a complete and stringent recording of corresponding cases in volleyball is not possible.”explains the German Volleyball Association (DVV) in response to a written request from Sportschau and emphasizes: “Eating disorders can occur individually in athletes, but do not represent a generalizable problem in (beach) volleyball.”
Lotte Goertz also suffered from the pressure to lose weight in volleyball. At the age of 18, she made her Bundesliga debut with Dresdener SC. She now plays for Schwarz-Weiss Erfurt. She attributes her years of disordered eating behavior to triggering comments from her childhood and adolescence. When she took the step from her hometown club to the next biggest youth team, she was criticized during a trial training session “I’m already chubby for volleyball”.
Body images even play a role in team tactics. “As soon as an opponent was a little bigger, she was immediately selected as a victim in the team. Then it was said: ‘Let her get moving, she’s not that fast.'”remembers Betty Lange. Such instructions have side effects. “Subconsciously, of course, it does something to you” says Lange. “I don’t want others to talk about me like that.”
Stress among the Weight checks
Weight checks and body composition tests are therefore common in volleyball. Goertz and Lange are familiar with these controls from former clubs. “It was always a very bad day for me”Lange remembers. Lotte Goertz says: “Of course I heard from my teammates that it was really stressful for them.” These experiences still have an impact on her today: “I hardly weigh myself anymore because it was so triggering for me back then, I got on the scales at least ten times a day.”
As a former national handball player, sports doctor Platen understands the aim of these controls, but emphasizes: “If I only measure body fat or weight regularly and leave the athlete completely alone with it, it can backfire. Then there is often a risk of developing an eating disorder because the athletes don’t know how to ideally reduce their weight without harming themselves at the same time. In my opinion, good support is part of this.”
The menstrual cycle as an indicator
In sports, the precursor to classic eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia is often the relative energy deficiency syndrome, also known as RED-S syndrome. “This means that, minus the training energy consumption, the body no longer has sufficient energy to maintain various functions and processes.”explains the sports nutrition department of the German Sport University Cologne on its website.
In women, the menstrual cycle serves as an indicator of health: “If an athlete doesn’t have a period, it’s definitely a sign that you should definitely look at the energy balance.”says sports doctor Platen. For years, Lotte Goertz tried to ignore the fact that she missed her period for a long time. Until a new athletic coach approached her about regulating her cycle through targeted weight gain and blood checks. Betty Lange also considered this health-related issue to be of secondary importance at the time: “It didn’t matter to me that I hadn’t had my period for four and a half years.”
Sports medicine specialist Platen therefore demands that “The topic of the menstrual cycle in sport should finally be removed from taboo”because it is so informative about an athlete’s energy balance. There is also a need for more discussions and information events.
“It needs clarification”
Platen warns against trivializing the harmful effects that poor nutrition and energy balance have on athletes. “You need education, both in trainer training and for the athletes. The associations need to be informed about these problems and they are ultimately responsible for initiating measures for their trainers.”
Upon request, the DVV writes that the topic of eating disorders is addressed “the same priority” like other health and psychological issues in competitive sports. The subject areas of communication/psychology and nutrition are part of the trainer training. In addition, would “All national squad athletes undergo a sports medical examination once a year and a complex performance diagnostics (KLD) twice a year” complete. “If necessary, appropriate interventions, for example in the areas of nutrition and/or sports psychology, will be initiated.”
Betty Lange has had different experiences. Although she did not actively communicate her eating disorder during youth national team training courses, there were physical signs of it, she says. For a long time I got the impression “Because I wasn’t a regular player, it wasn’t that important to them”.
The DVV writes that it is not possible to comment on an individual case. In principle, however, all federal squad athletes would have “Access to nutritional advice and sports psychological support at the Olympic bases”. In order to better prevent a lack of energy and eating disorders in the future, according to the DVV, young athletes have also received “in:prove” of the Federal Institute for Sports Science “individual nutritional recommendations”.
Corona pandemic exacerbates the problem
Eating disorders are not a phenomenon limited to sports. Young girls are particularly affected. What is noticeable in this group is an increase in cases of almost 50 percent between 2019 and 2023, i.e. during the time of the corona pandemic, as a study by the Kaufmännische Krankenkasse from Hanover (KKH) shows.
The pandemic was also a particularly challenging time for Lotte Goertz. The training rhythm that had been constant for years suddenly disappeared. She tried to compensate for this loss of control with planned meals: “I only thought about food from morning to night and then about breakfast again when I went to bed.”
For Betty Lange, eating during the pandemic also became “greatest enemy”. It was her club at the time, Schweriner SC, that finally recognized her problem and found her a sports psychologist. “They saw perspective in me and actively looked after it”says Lange, who was a key player in Schwerin.
The view out of the bubble
The main thing that helped Lange to overcome the eating disorder was looking out of the volleyball bubble. “When you’re in this system, you think this is the greatest thing and you’re the hottest”she says. It took her years to realize that her personal worth does not depend on her athletic performance, that volleyball isn’t everything and that she can do so much more “other than looking thin and performing“That’s why, she believes, young athletes in bases and boarding schools should have the chance early on “To also have something outside of volleyball.”
Lotte Goertz has also now overcome her eating disorder. Looking back, she would have wished for the following words back then: “You are not just what you eat, but you are much more than your body and what others say about it.”