Teammate Comparison and Disordered Eating in Young Athletes

Social comparison is part of competitive sport. Times, rankings, selections and personal bests all encourage athletes to measure themselves against others. This can be useful. Watching a teammate's technique or training habits may help an athlete improve. It becomes a problem when the focus shifts from what another athlete does to how her body looks.

A common pattern shows the risk. An athlete notices that a teammate is both faster and thinner. She concludes that thinness explains the speed, and that losing weight will make her faster too. This conclusion is not supported. Performance depends on training, genetics, technique, recovery, nutrition, sleep, psychological state, age, hormones, injury history and other factors. Most of these cannot be seen. Body size can be seen, so it is often chosen as the explanation. Once the athlete accepts it, food may start to feel like another part of training that must be controlled.

Teammate Influence

Teammates can shape how athletes think about food and behave around it. Scott, Haycraft and Plateau (2019a) reviewed 24 studies and identified several harmful forms of teammate influence: appearance-related conversation, critical comments, unhealthy team norms and competitive body comparison. The review also found a protective effect. Teammates who support healthy eating and notice signs of disordered eating can help create a healthier team environment. In a separate study, the same authors found associations between teammate influences, relationship quality, and eating and exercise psychopathology in athletes (Scott et al., 2019b).

This pressure is often unspoken. A coach does not need to tell an athlete to lose weight for the message to get through. Athletes see which teammates are praised. They hear conversations about calories. They notice when weight loss is met with approval. Over time, these observations can form an unspoken standard of what a successful athlete looks like. For this reason, appearance-related talk in teams deserves attention even when no one is being bullied.

Social Media and Comparison Outside Training

Digital media extend comparison beyond the training environment. Social platforms show athletes a constant stream of other athletes' bodies, meals, extra workouts and weight loss. For adolescents whose identity is closely tied to sport, it can be hard to tell inspiration from harmful comparison.

Fiedler et al. (2023) studied 591 adolescent athletes aged 12–19 across 42 sports. Longer daily social-media use was associated with more negative affect and more dysfunctional eating patterns. Social comparison was one of the factors that mediated these relationships. Athletes who competed at higher levels also reported more social comparison.

The wider research points the same way. A meta-analysis of 83 studies with 55,440 participants found that more online social comparison was associated with greater body-image concerns, more eating-disorder symptoms and lower positive body image (Bonfanti et al., 2025). The associations were moderate for body-image concerns (r = .454) and for eating-disorder symptoms (r ≈ .36). These findings are correlational. They do not show that social media or comparison causes eating disorders, which have many interacting causes. They do suggest that habitually judging one's body against other people's bodies is not harmless.

Why Comparison Carries Extra Risk in Sport

Appearance pressure in athletes differs from that in the general population. A non-athlete adolescent who compares herself with an influencer may think that she wants to look like her. An athlete who compares herself with a teammate may think that she must look like her in order to perform like her. Changing her body then becomes tied to ambition, selection, her coach's approval and the payoff for years of training.

This link makes unhealthy behaviour easy to justify. Skipping meals can feel like discipline. Ignoring hunger can feel like mental toughness. Training while exhausted can feel like commitment. Weight loss can feel like progress. The athlete may not see any of this as disordered. It may seem like proof that she is taking her sport seriously.

The thinking often develops in steps. It begins with "she is faster," then "she is thinner," then "perhaps that explains it," then "perhaps I should eat less." It can end with the belief that disciplined athletes put up with hunger. The original aim of improving performance is replaced by the aim of having a smaller body, and the two start to seem the same. Each step looks reasonable, so the pattern is hard to recognise from the inside.

The Role of Coaches

Athletes trust their coaches, so coaches' comments carry particular weight. A remark such as "look how lean she got over the summer" or "why can't you do what she's doing?" may be meant as motivation. An adolescent athlete may hear something else: that another athlete's body is the standard of success, and that her own body shows a lack of discipline or control. Coaches can fairly compare technique, discuss training and set performance goals. They should not present one athlete's body as the model for another. Comparing bodies should not be used to motivate athletes.

Reframing Comparison

Comparison cannot be removed from competitive sport, and it is not always harmful. Scott et al. (2019a) found that teammates can also have a positive influence through supportive friendships, healthy eating practices and vigilance for signs of disordered eating. A more realistic goal is to move the focus of comparison from bodies to performance. An athlete can ask what she can learn from a teammate's technique, rather than why that teammate's body differs from hers. She can ask whether she is giving her own body what it needs to train and recover, rather than how much another athlete weighs. She can judge her progress against her own earlier performance, looking at skill, consistency, recovery, strength and health rather than appearance.

Conclusion

Another athlete may be faster, stronger or built differently. None of this means that an athlete's own body is deficient. Athletes can admire, learn from and compete against teammates without adopting their bodies as a standard. When the question changes from "how can I improve?" to "how can I make my body look like hers?", sport can turn into a struggle against the body rather than a pursuit of performance. No athlete should have to win that struggle to feel entitled to compete.

References

Bonfanti, R. C., Melchiori, F., Teti, A., Albano, G., Raffard, S., Rodgers, R., & Lo Coco, G. (2025). The association between social comparison in social media, body image concerns and eating disorder symptoms: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Body Image, 52, 101841. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2024.101841

Fiedler, R., Heidari, J., Birnkraut, T., & Kellmann, M. (2023). Digital media and mental health in adolescent athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 67, 102421. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2023.102421

Scott, C. L., Haycraft, E., & Plateau, C. R. (2019a). Teammate influences on the eating attitudes and behaviours of athletes: A systematic review. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 43, 183–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.02.006

Scott, C. L., Haycraft, E., & Plateau, C. R. (2019b). Teammate influences and relationship quality are associated with eating and exercise psychopathology in athletes. Appetite, 143, 104404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2019.104404