King's College London

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rates of any mental illness. Hospital admissions have risen by almost 174% in the last decade and waiting times for support average 3.5 years. Yet early intervention is one of the strongest predictors of recovery.

Up to 80% of those with eating disorders struggle with compulsive exercise, and a significant proportion of those dependent on exercise are at high risk of developing an eating disorder. Harmful behaviours can be exacerbated, overlooked, or even encouraged in fitness spaces - so for those vulnerable, gyms and studios can be high-risk environments where healthy intentions become the demands of an unwell mind.

Obsessive exercise is increasingly common. Diet and fitness culture dominates social media in an era of unprecedented screen time, shaping how we perceive health, achievement, productivity and self-worth. Movement has become a marketing tool, shifting the focus away from prevention and towards performance and appearance. Attention and money are channelled into an industry where narrow definitions of health dominate, pushing more holistic and balanced perspectives to the margins. In this context, disordered routines and mindsets are easily reframed as discipline, commitment, or drive. Eating disorders, masked as “wellness”, slip by unnoticed.

Despite the statistics, the high stakes, and the degree of risk, there are currently no robust safeguards in gym and fitness environments to prevent those susceptible from becoming unwell or to protect those who are already ill from deteriorating further.

People are slipping through the cracks.

And I was almost one of them.

I trained as a competitive swimmer for over 15 years. Training was demanding, structured, and intense - but throughout that time I had a genuinely healthy relationship with movement, food, and my body. Exercise wasn’t something I used to manage my appearance or emotions, and food was never conditional.

However, in the final year of my career, due to a culmination of factors, I started struggling with an eating disorder. When it came to retiring from my sport, I was not only facing a change in routine, identity, sense of purpose, and a naturally changing body, but doing so while trying to recover from an illness that was entangled in each of these things.

As I moved out of competitive sport and into recreational fitness spaces, I was trying to renegotiate my relationship with exercise while unwell. In these environments, it was only too easy to lose the joy of movement. Exercise was no longer about a love for sport, my team, or performance - it became motivated by weight, size, shape, and control, reinforced by the culture and messaging around me.

While COVID meant I couldn’t access a gym as planned, I knew that, despite being really unwell, nothing would have stopped me from spending hours on a treadmill had I wanted to. When restrictions lifted, that same pull was still there.

I wasn’t alone. I met countless people in hospital who had fallen into this same gap - becoming significantly more unwell, without a word from anyone, in places that are supposedly centred on health and wellbeing.

Years later, now solidly in recovery, with a conviction shaped by the heartbreaking loss of a friend, Policy Idol gave me a way to bring this issue to light and take it forward.

My pitch, “The Fitness Industry & Eating Disorders: a call for safeguarding measures in UK gyms,” centred on three areas - screening, staff training, and resource provision. This involved educating staff on eating disorders and compulsive exercise, equipping them to recognise early warning signs, and enabling them to respond appropriately and signpost to support.

It also included embedding self-reflective prompts and resources within the gym environment to encourage members to consider their relationship with food and exercise, reconnect with their bodies, and check in with themselves - particularly in spaces where struggles can go unrecognised, as disordered mindsets and behaviours are often normalised or praised.

Collectively, these measures support gyms to uphold a basic duty of care and play a role in early intervention for an illness that claims thousands of lives each year.

Following the final, Professor Rachel Mills kindly connected me with relevant faculty and the gym team at King’s. That led to early work with the King’s Counselling & Mental Health Service, where I collaborated with the eating disorders lead to deliver internal training to gym staff. Following that, they agreed to begin piloting some initial screening measures, drawing on a combination of the tools I had proposed - a key step in moving this from idea into practice.

Since then, I’ve been working to develop this more formally and on a national scale through Eating Disorder Informed, a campaign I established last year. I am now working with Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity, and over the past eight months have been fundraising to cover the development costs for a CPD-accredited training for gym and fitness staff. Last month, we reached the benchmark to cover the full cost of training, which is now under development with Beat’s clinical associate trainers.

I’ve been building connections across sectors - with clinicians, coaches, campaigners and policymakers. I now have a website (www.edinformed.org) and a small social media following (@edinformed), which I’m working to grow to create a wider network and community, and increase visibility to support further progression. I’ve also launched a petition focused on eating disorders in health policy, including issues around parity of esteem and weight-centric approaches - something that feels particularly important to me as a dual-registered nursing student. I’ve met with MPs, written to and received a response from the Department of Health and Social Care, and engaged with members of the APPG on eating disorders, who have invited me to speak at a roundtable event in Parliament later this month.

Looking ahead, the next step is to pilot the training, with King’s as a potential site, followed by focus groups ahead of national rollout. I’m also working with a research team at the University of Birmingham to develop a study exploring eating disorders within gym environments - an area that remains significantly under-researched but critical to informing future policy discussions.

I have plans to create an ED-informed standard - a defined set of measures which, if adopted, would certify gyms as eating disorder-informed environments, marking a crucial step in embedding safeguarding within the fitness industry. I’ve applied for a funding grant and should hear the outcome shortly.

ED Informed is still growing and evolving, and I am learning as I go. Alongside a full-time master’s, placements, and everything else, it can be hard to balance - but stopping isn’t an option when lives are on the line.

If we close the gap, we can change the outcome. And change is long overdue.