This group is based around the 'Female Athlete Triad' and how it affects performance and even whether or not you can win in competition. The Female athlete triad consists of disordered eating, amenorrhoea (lack of menstrual periods), and osteoporosis. This problem occurs most commonly in sports where the athletes are put under significant pressure to do with their appearance (such as gymnastics, ballet, skating), or sports where a low body fat or low body weight is important for excellence (such as middle distance running, marathons, triathlons, and weight making sports like boxing and lightweight rowing).

Generally in order for these women to obtain these body 'ideals', some undertake disordered eating habits such as binging and purging, eating excessively tiny amounts to what their body requires, going on crash diets, using laxatives or other purging methods after they eat, or starving themselves down to extremely low weights where their athletic potential actually begins to decrease. This can sometimes lead to diagnosable clinical eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, and bulemia nervosa, but also the more common ones such as binge eating disorder and 'eating disorder otherwise not specified'. In general, anorexic behaviour for example is quite common in female marathoners and distance runners. Bulemic behaviour may be more common in gymnastics or ballet and lightweight rowing. However it really depends on the person, and not the sport, that may effect the kind of disordered eating behaviour.

Disordered eating can then lead to amenorrhoea, which is a lack of menstrual periods. The contributing factors that lead to amenorrhoea are very mixed, and depend on many things, different for each athlete. Some are: too low a body fat percentage, too much stress, overtraining, lack of sufficient dietary intake, purging behaviours and irregular eating patterns such as binging, and too low a body mass. Essentially if you've been menstruating but recently missed 3 consecutive menstrual periods, then you have oglio-amenorrhoea, and if you have never had a period and are over the age of 16, you could have amenorrhoea. Athletes with amenorrhoea produce less oestrogen and progesterone than menstruating athletes, and this can result in low bone density because the body lacks the hormones which tell it to repair and maintain itself properly. This can then lead to premature osteoporosis, or bone thinning.

This group is all about talking about your experiences or problems with the triad, or anyone you know who experiences these problems, or any questions or topics to discuss about it. Because women who have had experience with the triad in any way need to talk about it and stick up for and support each other!