Champion cricket Ellyse Perry has praised the bravery of her former captain Meg Lanning for shedding light on her battle with an eating disorder in the hope it will help others struggling with the debilitating issue.

A teammate of Lanning’s through Australia’s reign as a champion team over the past decade, Perry said it was difficult to hear that her former skipper had battled anxiety issues.

Lanning, 32, revealed earlier this month an unhealthy obsession with exercise, combined with not eating enough food to fuel herself, factored in her retirement from international cricket last November.

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“I think as a teammate of Megs, first and foremost, the whole team is just incredibly supportive of her and hopes very much that … her welfare is okay, and her wellbeing. That’s the most important thing,” Perry said.

“It’s obviously incredibly brave for her to come out and speak about those things and I’m sure, in doing so, she hopes that that helps other people as well who experience similar things across their time.

“It’s obviously really hard to hear that as a teammate and to know that someone that you’ve played with so closely for a long period of time has had some struggles. But at the same time, I really hope she’s doing well and, I guess, has access to the appropriate care that she needs.”

Lanning, who was a member of seven successful world championship campaigns and captained Australia for a decade, said she used exercise as a way to ease pressure.

“(Exercise) became a bit of an obsession. It was because I could escape mentally,” she told The Howie Games podcast.

“I would throw the headphones in (and) I wouldn’t take my phone with me. I would have my Apple watch with me and listen to music. Nobody could contact me. I really liked that because I felt like I was in control.

“I felt like I was eating. I was still eating. But I’m much more aware of it now. I was not eating enough. I’d eat maybe a couple of meals a day if I was lucky and they weren’t significant. It didn’t start off as a deliberate thing. It just became a bit of a new normal.

“It sort of slowly crept into conscious decisions. Essentially I felt good. I was light. I could run heaps. I wasn’t getting injured like everyone was telling me I was going to do. It almost became a bit of, ‘I am going to show you’ sort of thing.

“It sort of just spiralled and I was in denial. I got down to 57kg from 64kg. It wasn’t ridiculous but it was significant. The ratios were out of whack. But it was the other things that I did not realise. It [affected] my ability to concentrate. I didn’t really want to see other people. I disengaged a lot from friends and family. I didn’t realise that I was doing this. It sort of became a new normal.”

Asked whether he felt any responsibility for the pressure Lanning felt she was under as a leader in women’s cricket, Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley said investment in support services was an area that had improved significantly in the sport over the past decade.

“I was actually really, really encouraged that she was able to speak really openly about the journey that she’s been on, some of the challenges that she has faced,” he said.

“The professionalisation that we’ve talked about has happened, if you think about it, relatively quickly over the last ten years. Megs has been the most incredible player and captain, to be captain from the age of 21 for the last ten years. And … the support networks that exist at a national level or a state level (it is) something that we really want to make sure that we are putting the best support around all of our elite elite players and also, you know, across the workforce.

“But I commend Meg’s bravery. I think one of the things she talked about on the podcast (was that) being able to kind of speak to people has really helped. So hopefully, there are some really strong lessons in that for everybody and I just commend her leadership.”

Perry and Hockley were speaking at the MCG at the launch of CA’s Women and Girls Action Plan, which has set massive growth targets for women’s cricket over the next decade.

It has at its core plans to fill stadiums, increase opportunities for women crickets, grow participation, revenue streams and the number of females in significant positions while also investing in infrastructure across the country to grow gender-neutral facilities.

But in lieu of the struggles revealed by Lanning, Perry said that an investment in sports science and sports medicine was also critical to match the growth in women’s cricket.

“One of the things that’s really been highlighted amongst the high performance pillar is around providing even more opportunity and access to resources in the sports science and sports medicine area for female athletes,” Perry said.

“I think that’s been something across the board, not just in cricket, but in all sport that’s been significantly under-resourced. There’s very (few) studies that are specifically focused on female athletes, as it currently stands, and then as a result, we don’t know enough to support people as best as we possibly can.

“That’s something that we already heavily invested in, in cricket but … it’s not something that we can’t do better as well. So it’s a piece of the puzzle that’s certainly been put down to make sure that we continue to provide the best possible care to our athletes.”