Exercise, but not to extremes

Resolve to eat well and move joyfully, without developing food or exercise addictions

Date published: 1/1/2006

By JENNIFER MOTL

IT'S POSSIBLE to become addicted to healthy eating and exercise, and the results are paradoxically unhealthy. So don't take your New Year's resolutions too far. Healthy eating should be joyful and balanced, not an obsession with purity or thinness. And exercise should be fun, not upsetting the balance of your family, work or social life.

Eating disorders and exercise addictions are growing problems. Some gyms are requiring screenings and medical exams prior to allowing people to work out, because people with eating disorders and exercise addictions are prone to passing out, injuring themselves and suing the facilities.

There is a spectrum for drinking, from teetotaling to sipping an occasional glass of wine to becoming a homeless person who is addicted to alcohol. Similarly, there are spectrums for healthy eating, from joyful, healthful dining to dieting to potentially fatal disorders such as orthorexia (obsession with healthy eating) and anorexia (obsession with thinness that may lead sufferers to starve to death).

Exercising has a spectrum, too, from playful movement to structured fitness regimens to compulsions to exercise. Such compulsiveness can cause a person to miss work and skip parties in order to fit in a run, bike or do some other physical activity.

Just as an alcoholic person is driven by cravings and continues to drink despite bad consequences, an exercise or healthy-eating addict has obsessions that interfere with daily life.

Warning signs of exercise addiction include preoccupations with working out, exercising in secret, having a rigid routine, having fixations around weight loss, working out despite sickness or injuries, skipping work or social activities to exercise, or otherwise breaking promises in order to work out.

People may experience withdrawal, such as irritability, anxiety or depression, if they are unable to exercise for a day.

"My exercise is my social life. I don't have a social life outside that," said one exercise addict in an article published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Just as the genetic tendency toward alcoholism runs in some families, researchers say exercise addiction may have a physical basis, as well. The evidence so far is limited to mice and shows that mice addicted to running on little wire wheels activated the same parts of their brains that respond to addictive substances such as cocaine, morphine, alcohol and nicotine.

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Date published: 1/1/2006