High-risk and Overlooked: Fitness Spaces as Key Opportunities for Early Intervention

Sophie is a final-year Adult and Mental Health Nursing student and the lead of Eating Disorder Informed, rooted in her lived experience of an eating disorder and years spent as a competitive athlete. Having navigated recovery within today’s culture, where disordered routines are normalised and praised in health and fitness spaces, Sophie launched ED Informed to call attention to the risks too often overlooked.

ED Informed’s mission is to see every gym and fitness space become eating disorder informed - campaigning for mandatory staff training, safeguards, and resources across the industry. Its vision is for the fitness sector to become a key partner in early intervention, equipped to recognise warning signs, support members safely, and protect against harm.

In the UK, hospital admissions for eating disorders have risen by 122% in the past decade. An estimated 4% of the population is affected. Treatment waiting times now average 3.5 years, despite early intervention being the strongest predictor of recovery.

This is not new.

Seven years ago, the Ignoring the Alarms parliamentary report was explicit: too many avoidable deaths, too many missed opportunities, and a system that intervenes far too late. Crucially, it recognised that this is not simply a failure of specialist services already stretched beyond capacity. It identified the need for eating-disorder awareness and training across the wider workforce - the people who see risk early and often, but who are neither equipped nor empowered to recognise the signs or safely signpost to support.

The message was clear: early intervention cannot sit solely with specialists.

It depends on the settings people engage with day to day - settings that shape mindsets, beliefs, and behaviours, and have the potential to step in at the first signs of struggle. Schools and universities now have safeguarding frameworks, mental-health training, and clearer referral pathways.

But one major setting has remained almost entirely absent from this shift, despite a clear behavioural overlap with eating disorders: fitness spaces.

This absence is striking given the cultural landscape we are operating in. Obsessive exercise is increasingly common - normalised and celebrated. Diet and fitness culture dominates social media in an era of unprecedented screen time, shaping how we understand 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 channeled into an industry where narrow definitions of health dominate, pushing more holistic and meaningful understandings to the margins. In this context, behaviours that may represent something harmful are easily reframed as discipline, commitment, or drive.

Fitness spaces are high-risk environments where healthy intentions can become the demands of an unwell mind - where online ideals turn into offline behaviours, and where eating disorders, masked as “wellness”, slip by unnoticed.

Evidence shows that many fitness staff already sense when something is not right. Up to 75% suspect a client may be struggling with an eating disorder or compulsive exercise, yet fewer than half have any guidance or training on how to respond. Nearly one in five gym members are at risk of disordered eating, and people with eating disorders are almost four times more likely to develop exercise addiction.

Without safeguards, risk is overlooked and people slip through the cracks. This is not about blame, but about responsibility and a duty of care. It is about a gap that has been named for years and yet is still left wide open.

I was a competitive swimmer for 15 years, training in high-intensity environments where discipline and performance were normalised - and I loved it. Swimming gave me structure, purpose, and joy, and while I was very aware of my body, I had a healthy relationship with it. That began to change towards the end of my degree, as I approached retirement from sport alongside COVID, an unexpected transatlantic move, and separation from my family and friends, with everything that had anchored my identity falling away at once.

As my body changed and my sense of purpose disappeared, movement began to feel compulsory, and food conditional. My relationship with both deteriorated, and I quickly became unwell - despite struggling to recognise it at the time. This experience made clear that exercise can be hugely positive, but it hinges on intention. The same behaviours can support health or cause harm, depending on context, mindset, and susceptibility.

In my illness and recovery, I have witnessed - and continue to witness - disordered exercise and exercise addiction grow and escalate in fitness spaces, where these behaviours have become woven into the culture and expectations of the gym floor, and safeguards are absent.

ED Informed came from this realisation. Not that these environments cause eating disorders, but that they do accommodate and reinforce them. Gyms, leisure centres, and studios are common points of contact outside formal healthcare and are increasingly accessed through social prescribing schemes. People often turn to exercise to manage stress, emotions, or regain a sense of control - and that is where risk can lie.

ED Informed is campaigning for mandatory training, safeguards, and resources across the fitness industry so staff can recognise the warning signs of eating disorders and compulsive exercise, support members safely, and prevent harm. This includes specialist

staff training developed alongside Beat, a UK eating disorder charity.

If we can close the gap, we can change the outcome.

If not now, when?

To find more from Sophie and ED Informed please visit the following:

Website: www.edinformed.org

Instagram: @edinformed

On April 18th, 2026 we will be holding our annual #DumpTheScales Eating Disorder march in London please visit the information page for more here

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