Harriet Brown is one of Australia’s most successful Ironwomen, having won the Ironwoman series twice, a world title, and a world board race title.
The glamour of being an Aussie whose life is set on the beach is picture-perfect but, behind it all, Brown knows all too well there is a culture of unhealthy habits perpetuated by fitting that stereotype.
A qualified exercise physiologist, the 33-year-old noticed a pattern of young female athletes revelling in restrictive eating habits, wrongfully thinking this was serving their athletic performance.
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When having a conversation with friend, Lizzie Welborn – another Ironwoman who was, and remains, hot on Brown’s heels for racing accolades – Brown realised it was time to start talking about the elephant in the room.
“I got to a certain point in life where my body was changing as I was growing and developing, and I started to become really uncomfortable with what I looked like,” Welborn told 7NEWS.com.au
“It felt like I was gaining weight in all of these different places. To anyone around me, they probably wouldn’t have noticed anything different but, for me, it felt like my body completely changed.
“I was starting to have a lot of negative thoughts around my body and I thought that if I wanted to be a better athlete, I needed to become the leanest, most shredded athlete I could be, and that would mean I would be happy with my body.
“I went down a path of really restricting what I was eating … and in our sport, when we’re doing so much training, it’s just such a silly thing to do.
“I did start to lose weight, but with that, I also lost a lot of muscle, a lot of strength. I was really struggling at training emotionally and mentally.
“Just the pressure of thinking about your body all the time and thinking about what you’re eating becomes so consuming in your thoughts, I felt really alone.”
Eventually, Welborn’s coach cottoned on and warned her that under fuelling would see her miss out on her peak performance, and with that, plus a chat to Brown, she began to get the help she needed.
“I did end up losing my period because of those body image issues and then when I spoke about it with Harriet for the first time, and we unpacked it all together, that was when we realised that this stuff shouldn’t be so hard to talk about,” she said.
Brown and Welborn agree this is common practice in Ironwomen and surf life-saving circles, so much so that the obvious signs of restrictive eating can sometimes be applauded.
“We’ve seen so many other girls have the same issue, and we all see it, but we had never spoken about it,” Brown said.
She said a big misconception among female athletes was that if you lose your period you had reached peak fitness, and that myth was often discussed in lifesaving circles, making it something young women aspired to.
“When I started racing, all the girls used to talk about, ‘Oh, I’m so fit now, I’ve lost my period,’ and it was seen as a badge of honour,” Brown said.
“I remember being young thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not fit enough because I still have my period’, and now I know that that’s so detrimental to females in general, but especially female performance, their bone density, that kind of thing.
“If you don’t have a healthy regular period, it’s either due to RED (relative energy deficiency syndrome) or another medical factor.
“RED is a thing that happens when your energy expenditure is higher than your energy input, so whether that is restrictive eating or just not eating enough to meet the energy demand, it can lead to lots of different things that go wrong in the body and one of those is a loss of period.”
Brown described her own experience of having skin-fold testing, with the coach ‘approving’ each part of her body except her legs. She was told she had to trim them down.
She now knows her legs were almost purely muscle, but at the time it was based on size.
Brown said the coaching side of things had definitely improved, but there were still some horror stories.
“I’ve heard stories about athletes being handed multiple kilos of butter and the coach saying don’t come back until you’ve lost this much weight,” she said.
Through conversations like these, KaMana was born – with Welborn and Brown putting their heads together to create a series of workshops to “give young female athletes the opportunity to build confidence, feel empowered and reach their potential”.
The pair explore topics that aren’t spoken about enough: body confidence, menstrual cycles, nutrition, performance habits and mindset.
“As an exercise physiologist and an Ironwoman, I actually started having athletes come and see me and doctors referring athletes to me because these were female athletes who were struggling with menstrual cycle issues and things like that,” Brown said.
“They thought, ‘Oh, Harriet is a physiologist, she’s a female, and she’s an athlete, she’ll know all about this,’ and at the time, I didn’t – we didn’t learn anything about female athletes at uni.
“I started doing a really deep dive into female physiology, menstrual cycle, athletic performance – and it was overwhelming what we didn’t know.”
The pair have based their workshops around the common misconceptions that female athletes often grow up with.
“Every time we present a workshop, we do an anonymous poll to all the girls, and we ask them some challenging questions, and it has been fascinating to see that it’s probably around 95 per cent of the girls say that they don’t like the way they look,” Brown said.
“They think other girls are really confident and they’re not.
“These are young girls that you would think wouldn’t have a care in the world. They’re fit, they’re active, but this is a really, really common scenario or thought process that’s going on in everyone’s heads.”
Since launching KaMana, the pair have spoken to dieticians that are involved in AFL, netball, basketball, and soccer – with a lot of the same issues identifiable across the board for young women.
There is one very important part of the workshops which Brown says is crucial.
“The majority of coaches in Australia, especially elite coaches and teachers, are male, so they don’t have periods. They don’t understand this stuff from any first-hand experience,” Brown said.
“Often they say, ‘Oh, I’ll leave the room while you talk about the girls’ stuff’, and I’m like, ‘Absolutely not. If you’re coaching female athletes, you need to be aware of female physiology’.
“They’re shocked and amazed at everything that’s going on with a female in their cycle … because there’s lots of different things that happen around your mental cycle with your hormones and that kind of thing as well.
“This helps support the athletes – gone are the days when they have to sit there and feel like they’re the only one going through this.”
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