Mission Impossible: Balancing Body Weight and Physical Performance as a Military Woman

“I’m looking forward to SERE school. I heard you normally lose 7 or 8 pounds.”

Of the countless balancing acts that military women have to perform, the one between physical performance and body composition is perhaps the most frustrating. At least, it was for me.

I constantly felt stuck in the middle of two conflicting demands: low body weight and high strength.

In my near-decade of service in the Army, I never quite figured out the right strategy for balancing those goals; I under-ate and over-exercised, and it was only after leaving the military that I felt like I had the breathing room to re-examine those habits.

Now, with the clarity of hindsight, I can say that trying to reconcile these competing requirements caused me to adopt disordered eating patterns.

From years of observing my female compatriots (and myself) engage in intentional dehydration, chronic dieting, and other unhealthy means of meeting body weight standards, I would guess that most military women can identify with this struggle.

Fortunately, more research and awareness are starting to come out regarding the toll of chronic dieting on physical performance and the best practices for taking care of your body as a military woman.

In this blog post, I’ll share a bit of what I learned while navigating this particular balancing act, both while on active duty and after my separation from the military. If this topic resonates with you, know that you’re not alone—not by a long shot.

Personal Experiences on Active Duty

For those readers who are military women, let’s see how many of my experiences you identify with; I bet there are a lot. While on active duty, I was constantly exhausted.

Often upon waking up, my very first thought would be “How am I going to get through today, feeling like this?” I found it difficult to lose body fat and impossible to put on muscle despite exercising constantly.

While I met or exceeded all physical standards, usually maximizing my APFT score, I encountered frustrating plateaus in strength/power development despite going to an excellent CrossFit gym every day.

My dual anxieties about body composition and physical performance would not allow me to take adequate rest days; I would do a strenuous CrossFit workout in the afternoon after doing organized PT or taking an APFT that same morning.

I tried zone dieting, paleo, intermittent fasting, any new diet to try to lose weight, eventually sticking with long-term caloric restriction via macronutrient counting. 

I intentionally dehydrated myself leading up to APFTs—putting myself at risk of both performance decline and heat injury—since I knew height/weight screening would be conducted then too.

Mine was a very normal female body, and it carried me successfully through every physical task the Army required of me, but I constantly felt like I needed to drop 5-10 pounds.

I was always right on the line of needing to undergo the tape test for body fat screening.

Each time this happened (say, if I was menstruating, or had drunk too much water before the test), the pride of achieving the maximum APFT score was quickly displaced by the humiliation of being marked as overweight and forced to disrobe for the tape test.

Now, years after my separation, the absurdity of these competing demands is obvious to me.

At the time, though, I felt completely powerless to do anything about them. So, like many female service members, I managed them by under-eating and over-exercising. And my fatigue increased, my metabolism slowed, and my resilience suffered.

Maladaptive Strategies Observed

I also observed maladaptive strategies for weight management in many female colleagues. They’d diet for months or years straight. Wear trash bags in the sauna before an APFT. Take caffeinated weight-loss supplements of dubious quality.

I recall a female friend—of normal body weight, who met all physical standards—tell me, as we prepared to go to SERE-C school, “I’m looking forward to it. I heard you normally lose 7 or 8 pounds.”

Perhaps losing 7 or 8 pounds would have been appropriate for a Soldier who had gained 7 or 8 pounds of body fat in preparation for SERE school, which is a reasonable way to prep.

But of course, my friend had been dieting in the weeks leading up to SERE school, because like many Army women (myself included) she was always dieting. By any normal (read: non-military) metric, she did not need to lose 7 or 8 pounds.

For me, I can anecdotally say that losing those pounds at SERE school crashed my metabolism in a way that blew up my weight afterwards and took months to recover from, if it ever did.

Some research, like a study conducted on Ranger school students, seems to corroborate my experience; that study found that performance across all domains worsened and body fat percentage increased after the course.

It was conducted only on male students, however. Likewise, the only study I could find on SERE school specifically was conducted on 60 male Soldiers…not a single woman in the sample.

As with so many things related to my health and fitness in the Army, I just had to figure out how to manage on my own.

Understanding RED-S

One day, towards the end of my time in the Army, I came across an article describing a condition called Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S).

According to some studies, RED-S occurs when an athlete’s daily energy availability is too low—either chronically or acutely—to serve the athlete’s energy needs for both basic biological functions and exercise-related energy expenditures.

In simpler terms, athletes experiencing RED-S are not eating enough calories to fuel their bodies. 

RED-S can cause metabolic adaptation, known colloquially as “starvation mode,” in which chronic under-eating causes your body to slow the rate at which it burns energy.

This makes it much harder to maintain healthy body composition in the long run, plus it makes your body compensate for the energy deficiency in harmful ways, like sapping bone density.

You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that RED-S is more common in female athletes than male.

As elite runner and founder of Project RED-S Pippa Woolven put it, RED-S happens because “many of us mistake disordered [eating] behaviors as dedication to our sport.”

I would guess that for many women in the military, disordered eating arises from dedication to our jobs. I know it did for me.

Signs and Symptoms of RED-S

Finding out about RED-S was a eureka moment for me. Everything lined up: my under-eating, over-exercising, chronic fatigue, body anxiety, difficulty losing weight.

I fully believe that I was experiencing RED-S for the majority of my nine years in the Army, and I suspect that RED-S rates are high among military women in general.

I’ve copied and pasted the following bullets from Pippa’s article, which lists the signs of RED-S in women.

• Frequent illnesses and colds that took longer to recover from

• Increased injuries like soft tissue strains and later, stress fractures

• Irregular and missing menstrual cycles, which I initially dismissed as “part of training”

• Difficulty recovering from workouts and feeling drained, even after rest days

• Digestive discomfort and other gastrointestinal issues that didn’t seem to have an explanation

• Low iron levels

• Preoccupation with my diet and body, becoming increasingly anxious about the way I looked, ate, and trained

• Reluctance to rest and fear of losing fitness

I had nearly all of them. How about you?

Interestingly, the only symptom I didn’t have was “frequent colds and illnesses.” Instead, I would often get sick as soon as I went on leave.

It was like my mind was determined to keep my body moving at all costs at work, taxing me to the point where I’d crash health-wise as soon as I took time off. I realize now that this, too, was an anxiety-fueled maladaptive behavior.

Life After Separation

I’ve been out of the Army for around four years now. In that time, I’ve made many strides in my relationship with food, exercise, and my body.

I eat plenty of calories, adhere to a reasonable exercise schedule, and mentally emphasize health and performance over body weight.

If I decide to diet, which I might do a couple times per year, it’s for no more than eight weeks at a time, with long maintenance periods in between. Gone are my days of chronic dieting and two-a-day exercising five days a week.

Some impacts, though, I’ll likely be managing for the rest of my life. My period remains very irregular, and I’m still trying to figure out how to regulate it without going back on birth control.

I developed a sleep disorder on active duty, likely tied to chronic stress and associated hormonal disruptions, and it hasn’t gone away. My metabolism is still slower than I’d like it to be.

The musculoskeletal injuries I sustained on active duty continue to cause me chronic pain or flare up occasionally. I still have consistent dissatisfaction with my body composition, though that voice is quieter than when I was on active duty.

Being aware of it—and its irrationality—allows me to consciously focus instead on fueling myself, being active in ways I enjoy, and appreciating the strength and endurance of my body.

I suppose what I’m saying is that even if the anxieties imposed by the Army aren’t completely gone, I’m much better at managing them now. 

Policy Changes and Recommendations

While it took me leaving the Army to make healthy changes, I’m hopeful that raising awareness of RED-S and disordered eating will help women who are still serving make those changes now.

If the contents of this post resonate with you, definitely consider whether you might benefit from eating more, exercising less, resting regularly, and/or talking to your healthcare provider about RED-S.

Of course, the physical demands of the military make this easier said than done. Fortunately, though, the Army has made some strides in height/weight policy since I got out.

Policies like allowing the use of the more accurate body composition technology called the “BodPod” for height/weight screening are great; I found that the tape test routinely assessed me to be 3-4% higher in body fat than the BodPod.

The tape test itself was also updated in 2023, removing the hip measurement requirement for women and neck measurement requirement for all.

Another helpful policy is the one exempting Soldiers from height/weight screening if they earn a high enough score on the ACFT.

As the Army continues to reform its fitness testing, I hope this policy stays in place. It incentivizes performance over body composition and reconciles the problem of contradictory requirements for strength and body size.

I encourage military women to take advantage of these policies to manage their fitness requirements in a healthier way.

Conclusion: Eat More, Rest, Get Strong

I’ll end with a call to action for the Department of Defense to continue refining its physical fitness policies to ensure a healthy, strong, and adequately nourished force of men and women alike.

That outcome is optimal for both the individual service member and our nation’s defense readiness.

What problems remain? There is some evidence that the implementation of height/weight standards drives unhealthy eating behaviors among military personnel, with women and people of color affected at higher rates.

Prevalence of disordered eating remains higher among female service members than male, and RED-S among female military populations has not been studied nearly enough.

In fact, female military populations are under-studied compared to male populations in basically every way. The DoD should be deliberate about ensuring that discrepancy is remedied in future research.

Even now, though, there are steps the military can take to support its female warfighters. One is to ensure that all unit fitness coaches and nutritionists are educated in training female bodies and helping Soldiers avoid disordered eating.

Another is to emphasize the use of technologies like the BodPod to measure body composition, rather than the tape test.

Perhaps more controversially, there is a part of me that wonders what the impact would be if the military just…got rid of height/weight screening entirely. But that’s a conversation for a different day.

In summary: Eat more. Take rest days. Get strong. And know that as a female service member you are not alone in struggling with the Army’s standards for physical performance and body weight.

Note: Service members struggling with disordered eating can reach out to our friends at SEAWAVES for support and resources. SEAWAVES is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to empowering the military community by focusing on proactive wellness and preventative approaches to disordered eating.

Footnotes:

1) I believe any of these nutritional frameworks can be helpful to meet fitness goals if done correctly, but I was over-restricting on all of them, definitely not doing them correctly.

2)  I know this for a fact, because I had my Baseline Metabolic Rate (BMR) tested at the Army Wellness Center. It was below the normal range (slower than normal).

3)  Another study notes, “REDs symptoms may be caused by many factors, independent of or co-occurring with [low energy availability], including poor mental health, disordered eating and eating disorders, poor sleep, infection, injury and undiagnosed clinical conditions”—all of which are plausibly common in the military.