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When Sarah Bern was 15 years old, growing up in Kingston, south-west London, she loved sports but hated her body. Every morning her alarm would ring at 5am and she would run to the gym. After working out she would run straight to school. After school, she would run back to the gym for another workout.
This might sound like commitment, and in a way it was, but one thing Bern, the England rugby union prop currently competing in her third Women’s Rugby World Cup, wasn’t doing was refuelling. In fact, as the 28-year-old tells The Athletic, she was barely eating at all.
“I remember being in school and not fitting in,” Bern, who plays for Bristol Bears in the Premiership, and the only women’s prop to have been nominated for World Player of the Year, says. “I was always so much broader and bigger. I was born big. My sisters (Sammy and Gemma) are so tiny and petite. I look like them but it’s like someone’s gone, ‘We’ll put a load more muscle on you, we’ll make you broader’.
