Chelsea Blissett was standing in the change-room of a swimwear shop in Queensland when the voice in her head first started whispering.
Content warning: the following story contains discussion of eating disorders that may distress some readers.
She was young, about 14 years old, and had been looking forward to this trip for weeks. Growing up in Albury, which didn't have many surf stores back then, travelling to a big city was her only chance to try on a particular brand of bikini that she and her friends at school were obsessed with.
Her mum was there with her, too, walking up and down the aisles, picking brightly-coloured swimmers off the racks.
But when the teenager walked into the private booth, pulled the curtain closed, and looked at herself in the mirror, all she could do was cry.
"I hated everything," she says. "I couldn't handle it. I was like, 'I hate what I look like in this.'
"I remember getting into an argument with my mum because she was like, 'oh, I like this one! And this one!' and I had to keep saying, 'no, I don't like how it looks on me, I don't like anything about it.'
"That was my big first memory of starting to suffer at quite a young age from being very conscious of how I looked, of how much I was eating, how much I wasn't eating.
"It didn't really get serious until a few years later, after I had moved away and developed a bit more anxiety. That's when my binges started happening.
"But looking back, I definitely was starting to have triggers and thoughts and feelings which, now, were maybe early warning signs."
Now 22, Blissett is ready to share her story about how she developed (and, she says, is still managing) an eating disorder.
In a short film posted on social media last month, the Melbourne City and Young Matildas defender opened up about the pressures she faces not just as an aspiring athlete, but as a young woman growing up in a hyper-visual culture, and how the many unacknowledged stresses of her life manifest in a desire to control her food and her body.
"It's something that needs to be talked about," she says.
"No one ever really knows what goes on behind someone's closed door or how they feel. I think that's one of the reasons why [eating disorders] are not so much at the forefront; it's such an isolating and secretive disease. That's what it thrives on, that's what it craves.
"I wish there was more knowledge, more people understanding the way they think and feel, and maybe just more information on disordered eating.
"It would be great if there was less stigma around it.
"People have now gotten to the point where it's socially acceptable to talk about your anxiety and depression — because it should be socially acceptable to talk about those things — but I don't believe it's socially acceptable to talk about your eating disorder. That's where I want it to come to."
For Blissett, one of the spaces where she wants that conversation to begin is within sport — especially football, which has played a central role in her own journey, in both good and bad ways.
When she was 16, she moved from Albury to Sydney to pursue semi-professional football in the National Premier Leagues competition, as well as attend youth national team programs.
Living out of home, coupled with the stress of her studies, growing into her own body, and her fledgling football career, created layers of anxiety that slowly morphed from more 'socially acceptable' diets and exercise regimes into symptoms associated with bulimia nervosa: a type of eating disorder characterised by binge-eating followed by purging (vomiting) or fasting (not eating enough).
"I didn't really know what was going on, so I would emotionally turn to food all the time," she says. "I would have these binges, which then developed into bingeing and purging, just trying to get that release of tension and anxiety" she says.
"It was definitely a need for control. I got anxious, I was out of control, I was overwhelmed, so I would binge, and then I would purge to gain back a sense of control, because that was the thing that made me feel better.
"I don't think football initially had anything to do with me developing my eating disorder — no one had ever said anything about my weight or my body image — but it did help mask what the issues were. People would say, 'oh, she's just exercising more, trying to get fit and eat healthy for football,' you know?
"And because I was validated by what I was doing, and everyone was like, 'well, she looks great! She's doing so well!' then I think that was more of a cover for what was already happening.
"But going from the NPL and into elite women, playing in national teams, that's when I think it starts to contribute more because of the stress and anxiety of being a professional athlete, a lot more external pressure, and the lack of control."
Over time, Blissett's bulimia began to take a more serious physical toll.
She struggled to regulate her own body-heat; her fingers and hands turned a purple-blue colour from decreased circulation. Her nails became brittle, her face was pale and sunken. She slept terribly, stomach grumbling, constantly craving food. When she would stand up, she'd immediately feel dizzy and need to hold onto chairs or railings to steady herself.
Her resting heart-rate dropped, too, which was hard to identify at first: doctors who checked her didn't know if that was a result of the illness or because she was an athlete. These days, her smart-watch still pings when she's relaxed because it can drop below 40 beats per minute: a lingering side-effect of the damage it did to her heart.
More concerning, her period stopped for two years. Even now, it fluctuates in random cycles depending on her stress and activity levels as she balances study with part-time work on top of her football. Back then, though, she didn't realise that was a problem.
"That one's my favourite: 'oh, it's just normal for women athletes to lose their period,'" she says. "It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that that's actually not OK.
"I saw a GP early on in my recovery, and they told me: just go on the pill. That was their solution to me not having my period? To go on the pill? I was lucky that my mum was not comfortable with that."
She was scared to tell her club, Melbourne City, too. She was 18 by then, still new to the A-League Women, and didn't want to reveal anything that may have threatened her spot on the team.
But after a particularly bad away-trip, where she struggled to eat shared meals and had extreme anxiety, the club's medical staff realised something was wrong, and connected her with the PFA, the players' union, who put her in touch with a psychologist.
"Once I spoke up, they handled it very, very well," she says. "I was never made to feel anything less than who I was, and my worth was never questioned just because I had an eating disorder. They never made me feel like that.
"My coaches always said: if you ever feel anxious or anything, please tell us. We don't want you to be at training and not having a great time. So the club were amazing, but it was on me to kind of tell them first, rather than the other way around."
What is Football Australia doing to tackle disordered eating?
Alicia Edge remembers the first time she met Blissett.
Football Australia's new head nutritionist was at a conference run by the players' association, the PFA, to give a presentation about athletes' relationship with food and the foundation of healthy habits.
"It wasn't the average science or sports nutrition talk," she tells ABC.
"Chelsea came up to me afterwards. I still remember that moment because it made me think, 'that's exactly why I'm here.' It was her struggle, her story that really struck me in the sense that there is so much to do here."
Edge joined FA from the Australian Institute of Sport where she worked primarily with male athletes at the Centre of Excellence.
She came into the women's national team program in early 2019, excited to work with women footballers who she saw, on the outside, as strong, confident, powerful athletes. But once she was inside the tent, she discovered a culture around food and bodies that was far more damaged and damaging.
"I didn't even have eating disorders or disordered eating on my radar," she says, "but what I saw was very different to that.
"This isn't just football specific — this is very much sport-specific — but we've been talking a lot in the professional space about the over-emphasis of body composition and weight and what an athlete looks like, compared to what impact that has on performance.
"That over-emphasis comes from both external parties — whether that's support team, parents, peers, well-meaning people that really do believe it — but also internally, so the player can feel that comparison and pressure to look a certain way or be a certain weight.
"Disordered eating is very high in football [and] in all sports. More than anyone could anticipate. If we're looking at research showing maladaptive behaviours around food — anything from restriction, skipping meals, fear or anxiety around food, diet pills — the rates range anywhere from 40 to 80 per cent. That's the majority of athletes.
"That's when I realised that I can just continue putting out fires, or we can make a long-term plan to actually change the culture and the conversation when it came to nutrition and body composition. And that's hopefully what we've been improving over the last three or four years."
Edge, who is also on the Body Composition Committee at the AIS, helped co-design a new holistic nutrition program with FA staff which was far more pro-active and preventative, as opposed to the "very reactive, referral-based" system they'd had previously.
Now, players are 'screened' twice a year in the form of one-on-one interviews where they're asked questions around their relationship with food, their overall well-being and energy levels, as well as things like food affordability and security.
Their program filters all the way down into the junior national teams, teaching players how to reframe their relationship with their bodies and with food, breaking down dichotomies such as "lighter = better" or "sugar = bad", and providing the latest research around the symptoms of disordered eating.
Old methods of measuring athletes such as skin-fold tests, body composition scans, and set weights have also been eliminated from the national teams, with athletes taught about their own rights around what can be measured, as well as what they can say "no" to.
"When we look at the research, it's actually very hard to accurately say or even be able to research what the performance impacts are from just body composition alone," she says. "We have very few papers — like, in the single-digit number — that shows a performance connection to body composition change. And that's in all sports.
"So if we have these over-arching assumptions or rules that a player needs to be below a certain millimetre skin-fold or below a certain percentage of body fat, we need to check that and ask: where has this come from? Do we actually know that this is important?
"But if we can change that conversation to be performance-focused, then body composition is actually a by-product. What we really want to focus on are those daily actions, those daily habits that bring performance, because I can guarantee you that I've seen so many players reduce their performance as a result of losing weight.
"The next step in this cultural phase is to go to coaches and other staff members, to raise their awareness around what they're saying and what we need to be doing in this space."
Football Australia will soon finish reviewing their official policy around eating disorders in sport, which takes into account the latest research and the growing emphasis on athlete-centric sporting cultures and structures.
A key element of the policy is the creation of a safe body composition strategy, and education for all people involved in the game — from players to staff to families — to detect early warning-signs, particularly in clubs that don't have access to a nutritionist or dietician.
Another big element in the cultural shift sport needs to undertake is smashing the myth that all eating disorders look the same. "If you say 'eating disorder,' your immediate thought is a white teenage female that is anorexic," she says, "but that's not always the case.
"Something I always get back is, 'they don't look like it' or 'they're not thin enough'. And also, crucially, that athlete might be thinking exactly the same thing: 'I don't look like I have an eating disorder, I'm not sick enough to call for help yet.'
"As soon as you're thinking that, or the support team is thinking that, it's time to reach out and make that next step in getting help."
Recovery is a journey, not a destination
Although Blissett hasn't experienced a relapse in some time, her ongoing process of recovery has not been a straight line.
Indeed, for many people with eating disorders, there is no end-point to that journey; there is no scan or test or final number to give the all-clear. Instead, it is something that must be constantly managed, like a chronic illness.
In the case of eating disorders, what makes it more difficult to manage is that it's an illness insidiously reinforced by trends in fitness and diet cultures, and sharpened by social media, gender norms, and other external peer pressures.
"I'm still learning now," Blissett says. "I'm at a good point in my life where I feel comfortable speaking about it, but I don't want people to think that because I'm speaking up, I'm recovered and that it's never going to happen again.
"For me, over the past year and a half, I've still been having to 'break' food rules. I still feel anxious, still find myself thinking those old thoughts. I might have started getting help when I was 17, but sometimes I still feel it now. I don't want people to think that if you rock up to therapy for a while, it's suddenly all better.
"You could have been in recovery for 10 years, but in those 10 years, you might have experienced a stream of months of falling back into an old habit, not going out to certain functions, not eating something because that was your food rule.
"You're not going to get better overnight. It never goes away. It's just learning how to deal with it."
One of the ways that Blissett has learned to manage hers is by separating her illness from who she is as a person: seeing it not as a failure of herself, but as something alien, like a foreign agent with malicious intent.
"That was massive for me, because at first I was like, 'oh, this is me, this is my fault that I'm this way,'" she says.
"But no. I'm not like this. It's a disease; it's an illness. It's something separate, it's something attacking me, in a similar way to having something within your body attacking you physically.
"So every time I did get a thought or a feeling, I could use that and say, 'it's not me. It's someone else and they're just trying to hurt me, they're trying to make me do something that's going to bring me down, to make me not want to recover, to make my life feel like it's not worth it.'
"And then, on top of that, I've got more general techniques of breathing, meditation, trying to slow and calm my mind down — especially when it's racing with all these thoughts and feelings and being overwhelmed."
She counts herself as lucky, though: she was surrounded by family, football staff members, and union representatives who were able to connect her with the help that she needed. But the first big hurdle was telling them that she needed help - the onus was on her to come forward - which is something she thinks needs to change.
"It makes me really sad that sometimes, to receive the best care, you have to be a professional athlete, but it doesn't work like that," she says.
"And sometimes, initially, even professional athletes don't get the care because they were too scared to speak out, or they didn't think anything was wrong.
"It's heartbreaking to think back to all those people still out there who, because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of conversation, they're not receiving the proper care they really do need.
"I was on the phone to someone at the Butterfly Foundation [eating disorder hotline] the other day, and she told me that apparently eating disorder research and funding is 10 years behind anxiety and depression, which is crazy.
"The fact that it's still stigmatised and shamed is a real problem, because just like anxiety and depression, it debilitates your quality of life tenfold."
Blissett wants to be part of the solution. In addition to sharing her story, she is studying Nutrition and Dietetics at university (inspired, in part, by doing an internship with her own dietician), and hopes to move into the clinical field so she can work hands-on with people who are going through what she is.
The short film was "better than she could have imagined." She's had parents, coaches, even other players in the A-Leagues (women and men) and national teams contact her to say thank you and, in some cases, share their own stories.
That, for Blissett, is where the next part of her journey starts: silencing the little voice inside her head, and instead using her own to make the world around her a better, kinder place.
"Everyone kind of knows, but no one's talking about it," she says. "That's what I want: to break those walls down. Let's have that conversation. How do we start to fix that?
"More information needs to be out there. How do we get these people the help that they need? Or how do we allow them to know that it's OK to ask for help, that it's OK to speak up?
"I want anyone reading this to know that it's OK. I know you don't feel OK, and it's scary to get help, but once you take that first step forward, it literally changes your life for the better. It brings back so much to you.
"It's scary and it's isolating, but that's because [the illness] doesn't want you to get help. So I would encourage you, if you're feeling like this, please speak up to someone: whether it's a friend, a team-mate, contacting The Butterfly Foundation, your nearest Headspace. Anybody.
"It's hard. I know it's hard. But once you get the help you need, it makes it all worthwhile."
