Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World

by Lauren Fleshman

We need policies like those created around concussions that specifically protect the health of the female body in sport. We need to create a formal certification to work with female athletes that mandates education on female physiology, puberty, breast development, menstrual health, and the female performance wave. We need to be able to monitor menstrual health and educate people about RED-S. We need to draw boundaries preventing race weight and body composition from being emphasized in high school or college, or any time before it is developmentally appropriate. We need eating disorder literacy, so we know how to identify, prevent, and talk about them. And we need eating disorders to be treated like self-harm, requiring coaches to immediately report and refer someone suffering to a specialist, because the likelihood of making a full recovery is strongly correlated to the length of time before intervention.