“You would set yourself a target and if you came back from your off season to your preseason and you didn’t hit that target, you would be put into a group that would have to do extra cross training \u2014 or some form of training to strip some fat off,” Heppell said on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.<\/p>\n
“And the boys hailed this group ‘fat club’. It was a pretty vicious one, to be honest.<\/p>\n
“The relationship with food and stuff was horrendous and body image and shocking.<\/p>\n
“When I had a broken leg, so I’m on crutches all off season and I didn’t hit my skinny targets, so I’m in fat club for pre-season. I was like, ‘you kidding?'”<\/p>\n
Heppell played 253 games for Essendon between 2011 and 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Dyson](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/4ccd388e07bc1dcfd80a2bef2b90b825.jpeg\")
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Dyson Heppell played 253 games for Essendon. (Getty Images: Quinn Rooney)<\/p>\n
Heppell said he would often obsess over his eating, including pre-preparing meals and being wary of eating when the team was away.<\/p>\n
“Early in my career, I ended up with a pretty unhealthy relationship with food. And [it] wasn’t a full eating disorder but it was \u2026 it was disordered eating,” Heppell said.<\/p>\n
“I’d hardly want to go out and eat.”<\/p>\n
Fellow contestant, former NRL player Luke Bateman, who played for the Canberra Raiders between 2015-2019, also said unofficial ‘fat clubs’ were present across rugby league.<\/p>\n
In 2016 it was reported that Carlton had a ‘fat club<\/a>\u2019, set by then-Blues coach Brendon Bolton and his fitness staff.<\/p>\n The body image pressures impacting elite female athletes <\/a><\/p>\n Throughout her career, former ice dancer Matilda Friend struggled with disordered eating and felt pressure to look a certain way. ABC’s Women’s Sport survey shows she isn’t the only one.<\/p>\n Measured by skin folds, if a player had more than 12 per cent body fat, they would be put into ‘fat club’ and have to undertake intense training before rejoining the main group.<\/p>\n At the time, sports administrator Brian Waldron condemned the initiative, saying it was socially irresponsible to name the group the ‘fat club’.<\/p>\n “Surely they could call it something else,” Waldron said on SEN.<\/p>\n “There will be kids walking around school today being told they’re in the fat club and I think that is just social stupidity to be calling a group of players into a group they call the fat club.”<\/p>\n In 2024, the AFL banned clubs from conducting skin fold testing on prospective draftees in a move that was widely panned by footy media critics.<\/p>\n ‘I hated my body’: Erin Phillips opens up on body image issues<\/a><\/p>\n Dual sport star Erin Phillips describes the ‘terrible’ damage inflicted by skinfold tests and the Opals bodysuit uniform.\u00a0<\/p>\n For AFLW players and girls coming through the system, they could opt out entirely of being weighed.<\/p>\n A memo sent to clubs, addressed by Kate Hall and Grant Williams, read: “Body weights will only be measured by qualified High Performance\/Sport Scientists, Sports Dietitians, or Medical Practitioners, in a safe and private setting. All data collected must be kept private.”<\/p>\n Former AFL premiership-winning coach Paul Roos was among those critics, telling the ABC’s new AFL Daily podcast<\/a> that if players were worried about skin folds, they should “go and find another job”.<\/p>\n However, former players continue to speak out about unhealthy habits around food and weight obsession during their playing days.<\/p>\n