Body image, anxiety and elite women athletes

Elite women athletes may face considerable challenge in negotiating a healthy relationship to their bodies. The path to body image anxiety is both multi-faceted and complex, requiring a prior vulnerability, supported by cultural values and challenged by the elite sport environment. Raising awareness of this issue through identifying prior vulnerability; providing the permission and opportunity for athletes to give voice to this issue, and addressing those systems which support and perpetuate an exclusive focus on athletic development to the detriment of a balanced sense of self, are some of the avenues available to high performance sport in proactively challenging the incidence of body image anxiety in the population of elite women athletes. (non-author abstract)