There are two days that will forever be etched in Jess Breach’s mind. The time she became a three-time Six Nations Grand Slam champion with England earlier this year is not one of them. Nor the time she famously scored six tries on her Red Roses debut in 2017, when she announced herself as one of English rugby’s brightest new stars.
Instead, she distinctly recalls sitting with her mum, Tricia, in her local coffee shop, five years ago. “I was in Pret, upstairs where I live in Chichester and I broke down to my mum and told her I couldn’t do it anymore,” recalls Breach. “It was tough for her to see and listen to it and she told me I didn’t have to do all this stuff.”
For months, Breach had been gripped by body image insecurities and had developed a dysfunctional relationship with food. It was her first season as an England sevens player and, having spent weeks at a time travelling the world with her teammates - and living away from home for the first time - the rigours of professional rugby had begun to take their toll. Desperate to fit the image of an athletic-looking sevens player, she became determined to lose weight and began skipping meals.
“I knew what I was doing wasn’t right, so I didn’t want to get onto the scales and see I was a certain weight and be like, ‘I can’t even have dinner tonight. It was a tough period in my life and food became the only thing I could control,” says Breach, in her first interview with a British newspaper about her ordeal.
It was the start of a challenging period altogether for Breach, whose mum would later be diagnosed with breast cancer in April 2019. Tricia broke the news to her daughter in the car. "That's the other day that will always stick with me - not because it's a sad moment - but a moment when you realise how much of life you still want to live and experience,” she reflects.
Breach cannot pinpoint a particular trigger for her body image worries. Rather, there were several factors that gradually began to overwhelm her: the tight-fitted sevens kit she would wear, with shorts that were more revealing than she would have liked. Beyond the sphere of rugby, there were the perils of social media. Each time she went on Instagram, she struggled to escape the constant stream of filtered, feminised images of skinny women, which made her obsessed with her teenage ‘puppy fat’. “When I looked in the mirror or got on the scales, I constantly compared myself to other people, I was like, ‘My puppy fat has still stayed longer than others,’” she says.
Breach is not alone in experiencing body image issues, which come with a tremendous amount of shame, stigma, and secrecy both in society and sport. They are also one of the main reasons why teenage girls drop out of sport - a study published in March this year by the charity Women in Sport found that nearly half of all teenage girls avoided exercise because they were overly conscious of how they looked.
But as an international athlete, Breach consciously paired her dysfunctional relationship with food with how she performed in the gym. At her worst, she recalls training on just one bowl of cereal and wouldn’t touch anything else until dinner. Whether or not she skipped a meal was often determined by whether she hit her targets. “Some days they [my numbers] wouldn’t be very good or in a session I’d be so tired,” she said. “Other days I’d be fine, but if I’d eaten a bit more and I did perform better, I wouldn’t eat that night. So the next day I’d drop again. My friend from Harlequins told me she wanted to lose weight so she asked how I did it. She was like, ‘Did you meal plan? Meal prep? I openly told her I just didn’t eat, plain-faced. Then she was like, ‘Jess, that’s really unhealthy.’”
Even those closest to her began suspecting something was up. “Zoe Harrison is one of my best friends,” says Breach, with a slight twinkle in her eye as she mentions the England fly-half who she flew through the junior ranks with. “She only told me this when we spoke freely about it but she and [England player Sarah] Beckett went to speak to one of the England physios to make sure I was okay. She never told me that.”
It was the coffee shop moment with her mum which proved the turning point. Breach sought help from a therapist and, after wrestling back control of her eating, embarked on a mission to learn more about herself and her body. She even completed her dissertation on how body image affects female rugby players as part of her degree in sports communication and marketing at St Mary’s University. Since moving back into the XVs in 2019, she has established herself as one of the most clinical wingers in the women’s game, having scored 29 tries in 23 England appearances, earning the nickname the ‘Jess Express’.
Breach, who will make her World Cup debut in England’s final pool game against South Africa on Saturday, does not want pity. What she wants is to help others, especially those who might be going through something similar. “I’m not ashamed of talking about the fact I skipped meals because I don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” she says. “I don’t want anyone else to feel ashamed that they need to ask for help. As cliche as it sounds, it’s okay not to be okay - it doesn’t make you a lesser human.”
