Class act: whether lecturing college students, conducting research or training in the gym, Michele Olson now has the wind at her back - Real Women - Professor of exercise science Michele Olson: her story and conditioning techniques - Biography

Muscle & Fitness/Hers, June, 2002 by Jeff O'Connell

Her primary research interest also concerns nutrition; namely, eating disorders, disordered eating (they're different) and body-image problems, which of course tend to be correlated with eating disorders. "Disordered eating simply means that there's something disorderly or unbalanced with your eating," explains Michele. "It doesn't mean you have a clinical disease such as anorexia or bulimia. For example, if you won't eat a far gram, you're missing a major category of nutrients--that's disordered eating. So is skipping meals."

It's also one leg of a phenomenon called the female athlete triad, another area of expertise for Michele. In a nutshell, when a hard-training female athlete restricts her calories, she'll often miss her period for months at a time, a condition called amenorrhea. Initially, the athlete often views this development favorably as she no longer craves food during the last half of her cycle. Unfortunately the accompanying decline in circulating estrogen interferes with the uptake of calcium by bones, a precursor of osteoporosis.

Michele blames the tendency of young American women to engage in disordered eating in part on the media and its advertisers. "I'm not going to point to a specific model and say she's got anorexia--that's sort of beside the point," she says. "Her body is modeling, if you will, an anorexic body one that's beyond the bodyweight 'cut point' for that eating disorder That's what [women] are seeing, and the only way I know that you can look like that is to basically become anorexic."

pulling up anchor-again

Michele's latest research project will again take her away from familiar shores. This time; she'll make forays behind bars, where she intends to study eating disorders and body-image problems among incarcerated women. The phenomenon was brought to her attention at a meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, where she was approached after giving a presentation on body image by a female exercise physiologist who has consulted for a private women's correctional facility in Las Vegas. Michele was intrigued by the revelation that. majority of female inmates suffer from at least some of the problems on which she had just lectured.

"The woman explained to me that' the folks in the upper echelon think of eating disorders as just a pseudo problem," says Michele. "Their attitude toward her was, 'These girls are hardened criminals, they've abused drugs, and so forth.' She said, 'Yeah, that's true, but almost all of them have some sort of eating disorder, and I believe that the drug-taking, and the things they do to support it, happens because many of them are taking things like methamphetamines to suppress their appetite and keep their weight down.' Denied access to drugs in jail their bodyweight typically normalizes. Upon their release their self-assessment is, Look at my body; look at how big I've gotten This often sets off a vicious cycle of more drug taking more crime and, more often than not, a return trip to the joint.