Eating disorders and related weight control behaviors, such as excessive exercising and restrictive eating, represent serious health problems for girls and women in the United States and other industrialized nations. Female athletes, in particular, have been identified as a subgroup to study because of the unique weight, performance, and body image pressures they experience from coaches, teammates, fans, and judges. Such "sport-environment" pressures, when combined with general societal messages about the need to be thin and attractive, are thought to substantially increase female athletes' risk of developing disordered eating problems. To date, only a few eating disorder studies included sufficiently large samples of single at-risk sports, so little is known about the extent to which athletes in these sports use pathogenic weight control behaviors and experience clinical and subclinical eating disorders. Thus, the purpose of this study was to survey a geographically diverse group of female collegiate athletes from two at-risk sports--swimming/diving and gymnastics. In doing so, the authors first wanted to examine the prevalence of clinical and subclinical disorders. Second, because relatively few athletes exhibit sufficient number and severity of symptoms to be classified as subclinical or clinical in their eating behaviors, the authors also wanted to determine the extent to which they engaged in pathogenic eating (e.g., binging) and weight control (e.g., excessive exercising, vomiting, dieting) behaviors. The authors selected these behaviors because they are individual symptoms of disordered eating and may be precursors to the development of subclinical or clinical disorders. (Contains 1 table.)