Peyton Bilo was on a mission.
Coming off two stress fractures to her shin suffered during her junior year of high school, Bilo was willing to do what it took to have a successful senior year on her high school cross-country team.
Bilo’s coach, an older man she described as “very traditional, very old fashioned” had one solution for the 16-year-old who measured 5 feet 6 inches and weighed 135 pounds: lose weight.
“I’d be like, hey, I got on the scale and I’m down to 130 and he says ‘That’s great. Keep going.’"
“I was very unaware of the negative aspects of that.”
In a sport where forced weight loss is all too common, what became part of Bilo’s rise would ultimately lead to her downfall.
She started with cutting out the extra snacking at night. Then sandwiches at lunch became salads. Then no seconds at dinner.
“It slowly started to take hold,” Bilo said.
And it worked.
By the end of the year, Bilo had lost 15 pounds and saw significant improvements in her time. She placed 12th in the CIF State championships and signed with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Division I cross country team after being passed over by top Pac-12 schools.
“I still viewed myself very positively, was having fun, loving the sport, just working hard and still viewed food restriction as part of working hard,” Bilo said.
Bilo’s father, Rob, saw her weight loss similarly.
“We could see her certainly start to lose some weight and change her body a little bit. But it didn't alarm me as her dad.”
But when she got to Cal Poly, Bilo, who was 17, found herself surrounded by a team obsessed with diet and weight-loss.
“It's all we do is work out and discuss meals,” Peyton’s dad recalls her telling him. Comparing herself to her older and faster teammates, Bilo concluded that she needed to lose more weight.
“That's when the real restriction started,” said Bilo, who said she was already at “the low end of where I should be weight-wise, so I really had to restrict in order to lose more weight.”
Performance-wise, Bilo was ascendant, already far outpacing the expectations of her coaches. In cross country, she won Big West Freshman of the Year honors, finished runner-up at the conference meet, and competed at the NCAA championships.
Her father, who took professional photos of the team at each race, also began to worry. “I started to get a concern for the first time when I would look at the picture and just see how thin she was starting to get,” he said.
“I did not look good. I see myself in pictures now and I just cringe at it,” Bilo confessed.
When Bilo opened up to her roommate and best friend, Jean-Marie McPherson, about her high school coach initiating her weight loss, McPherson asked how much weight she had lost. At the time, Bilo thought it was “a good thing” or “something cool.” When she told her friend that she was down to 104 pounds, McPherson issued a warning.
“’Peyton, this is going to catch up to you,’” Bilo recalled McPherson saying. “’This is really bad for you. This is not healthy. I can see that you're so stressed out and I can see the way you eat at meals and that it's controlling you. It's taking over.’”
Bilo was stopped in her tracks.
“And that was really the first time that it hit me, and I was like, Oh my God, I have a problem,” she said. “I have an eating disorder. I'm one of those people.”
Bilo immediately opened up to her coach, Priscilla Bayley, who declined comment for this story. According to Bilo, others on the team at the time were also struggling with issues of weight loss. Bayley helped Bilo get counseling and a nutritionist, who placed her on a meal plan.
“’You’re telling me I need to eat this much,’” Bilo remembers saying to the nutritionist. “’There’s no way, I am not doing that.’”
She agreed to follow one planned meal per day, then two, then all three plus snacks.
Bilo says it was very hard to gain weight with all the activity from her sport, walking around campus and hanging out with friends, claiming she was “eating more but not really seeing any changes.”
For the next year and a half, her weight stayed the same. But on the track she continued to rise.
Bilo became an All-America in track and cross country, ranked in the top 10 on FloTrack, finishing 23rd at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, and 10th in the NCAA Track and Field 5,000 meters. Schools she had once dreamed of running for, such as Stanford and Washington, were now her competition … and she was beating them.
“You're just in this weird spot,” said Rob Bilo. “As a parent, I was so incredibly proud of the results she was having. But certainly in my head looking at her, it was really starting to worry me.”
And then it all unraveled.
Bilo suffered a stress fracture in her sacrum, a sign that she had low bone density. Further tests revealed she had osteoporosis in her spine and a long-term nutritional imbalance. Her restricted diet had finally caught up to her. To save a year of eligibility, she opted to redshirt her junior year.
“I was in chronic pain. I couldn't sit through class. I couldn't do anything except lie on my back and not be in pain,” Bilo said. “Walking hurt, wearing a backpack hurt, any form of cross training or biking hurt.”
Trying to come back too soon, Bilo reinjured her back again. She felt isolated and depressed, unable to do what she loved. “I don't want to say hate ‘cause that's really strong, but some days, yeah, I hated myself.”
As she gained weight, and unable to exercise, eating became a “very big trigger.”
“My junior year was full of shame and guilt,” Bilo said. “I felt like my injury was just completely my fault. So I was constantly blaming myself.”
Eventually, she healed and regained her menstrual cycle, which she had lost while training in high school (something that is not uncommon for competitive female runners). That summer she spent training solo in Flagstaff, Ariz., a running mecca, where she fell back in love with the sport.
She returned her fourth year to race at a much-healthier 115 pounds. But she was running “a lot slower” and continued to struggle with negative self-talk.
“I would see pictures of myself running and it would just kind of gross me out, how much heavier I looked than I did in the past,” Bilo said.
After a difficult cross-country season in the fall, she decided to open up to her teammates about her struggles.
“My teammates were just the most supportive and amazing women in the world, they helped me so much and were just constantly lifting me up,” Bilo said. “I would've quit if it wasn't for them.
“I'm so much more than all these numbers that my sport focuses on, like how much I weigh or what my PR’s are or how many miles I ran that day … escaping the numbers trap that so many runners fall into.”
Bilo said she is grateful for the lessons she has learned from her journey, but would “never wish it on anyone else.”
Now in her final year of eligibility at Cal Poly, Bilo, 22, is injured again–this time with a torn muscle that will keep her out for the remainder of the cross-country season.
“I think I would've probably reached or succeeded my past times,” she said. “I felt super-fit, and my endurance is way higher because my fueling is so much better. But the injury was just kind of random and, you know, that's life.”
Still as enthusiastic and in love with the sport as ever, Bilo hopes to continue running competitively after college.
“I feel like I did pretty well running on empty. Imagine what I could do running fueled and with love in my heart and love for the sport, instead of just stress and focusing on the outcome.”
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