Strength Is Radical: What Women Olympians Teach Us During NEDA Week

During National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, conversations about food and bodies can feel heavy. They often center on risk, warning signs, and harm. Those conversations matter.

But there’s another story unfolding in real time, one about power, autonomy, and performance.

On the world stage, women are breaking records, earning medals, and redefining what strength looks like. Not by shrinking themselves. Not by chasing aesthetic ideals. But by fueling.

Fuel Is Not a Weakness — It’s a Strategy

When Alysa Liu returned to competition on her own terms and won gold, she said something that cut through decades of pressure in aesthetic sport:

“No one’s going to starve me or tell me what I can or can’t eat.”

Figure skating has long been shadowed by disordered eating. Thinness has often been conflated with grace, lightness, and competitive edge. Her statement wasn’t just personal — it was cultural. It challenged the idea that excellence requires deprivation.

Around the same time, Jutta Leerdam openly credited her high-carbohydrate approach — yes, pasta included — for supporting her performance. In a sport that demands explosive power and sustained speed, carbohydrates are not indulgent. They are foundational physiology.

Glycogen fuels high-intensity effort. Adequate energy availability protects hormones, bone density, and recovery. Under-fueling compromises strength long before it changes appearance. Elite performance is not compatible with chronic restriction.

Alysa Liu

Jutta Leerdam

The Bigger Cultural Context

We are living in a moment dominated by weight-loss messaging. GLP-1 medications are widely discussed. “Before and after” photos trend daily. Smaller is still marketed as better.

Against that backdrop, watching women win through nourishment feels radical.

Personal records.World records.National medals.

Not because they disciplined themselves into less. But because they built muscle, trusted hunger, and supported recovery. Health is not synonymous with thinness. And performance whether athletic, professional, or personal requires fuel.

What NEDA Week Asks Us to Remember

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is not only about identifying pathology. It’s about shifting culture. It asks us to reconsider:

• Why do we equate worth with size?

• Why do we praise restraint more than strength?

• Why is hunger treated as something to suppress rather than honor?

If Olympic-level output requires adequate nutrition, so does everyday life. Your brain, your hormones, your immune system, your mood — none of them run well on scarcity.

Strength is not just visible muscle, it’s bone density. it’s menstrual regularity., it’s cognitive clarity, it’s the courage to eat enough in a culture that applauds less.

Redefining Strong

The lesson from these athletes isn’t that everyone needs to train like an Olympian. It’s that bodies perform best when they are supported. Fed. Respected. Allowed to take up space.

During NEDA Week, perhaps the most radical stance we can take is this:

Your body is not a project to shrink, it is an instrument to fuel.

And strength — true strength — requires energy.