Workout and Diet Advice for Women over 45

Your friend says:  “I am addicted to cardio” – and you think Wow, that is a good thing to be addicted to, as you think of Belgium chocolate as the something you would normally associate with “addiction” – or worse, alcohol or drugs!

First let’s look at the definition of addiction. 

                        Addiction is doing something you know is detrimental to your mental, physical, or emotional well-being, yet you do it anyway.

But exercise is good for us, right?  Of course it is.  So more exercise must be better!  More than what, is the perhaps the question you should ask.   If you are starting from a point of 30 minutes, twice a week, then more is definitely better.  If you are starting from a point of 2 hours, 7 days a week, then is more really better?  Is it in fact an addiction with some detrimental effect?

I feel as if I uncovered a dirty little secret – something no-one wants to discuss – perhaps for fear of giving people an excuse to not exercise if we talk about the negative effects of exercise addition!  I happened to see an article in a Fitness magazine (printed copy) from March 2010.  I waited for it to be listed online (like the rest of their printed articles that appear about a month after the magazine has hit newsstands to allow the printed copies to sell).  It never appeared.  Even now a search of the site brings up ZERO results.  A search on Google (for exercise addition) produces tons of results of course – but mostly it is about celebrities transformations, sensationalizing their new look which is not helping the young fans who want to emulate the celebrities. 

So back to the printed article I did find – and that I was so fascinated by that I couldn’t let it go.  The headline is “Confessions of a Cardioholic” and the introduction above the headline reads:

 “Being Consistent with your workouts is one thing.  But as this writer found, when exercise takes over your life, the results can be more harmful than healthy”

Her daily routine: by 4:52 a.m. she is heading to the gym – she runs the 0.27 miles then completes the run with exactly 7.73 miles on the treadmill.  This is followed by 25 minutes of strength training, a 5 minutes stretch then a walk home.  At home there is another ritual to compete the morning exercise ritual – “a mirror check to asses my lean frame, and then a hop on the scale to determine my weight with painful exactitude.  The result can make or break my mood for the day.”  

Forget the exercise – am I the only one who shuddered when reading about the precision of the timing, the routines and the rituals?  Did this sound like a borderline disorder only to me?  Not being a trained Psychiatrist, I will leave that line of discussion to the experts.

The writer goes on to say that her friends told her she was lucky to be so committed to exercise.  Yet at some point she realized that it might be a problem.  Susan Moore, of the Renfrew Center (a treatment facility for eating disorders in Philadelphia) says “… (exercise) can become a compulsion, an obsessive need to work out multiple times a day, multiple hours at a time, at the utmost intensity your body allows”.

Mental health professionals call this ‘exercise dependency’ – when you consistently feel compelled and obligated to work out, no matter what.  Another name for compulsive exercising is “anorexia athletica” but no-one mentions this, or the fact that many of the stars featured in the online articles likely have serious problems.   One article highlighted pictures of stars “who showed muscle from over exercising”, as though having muscle is a problem, not the celebrities whose legs are thinner than most people’s arms.  Talk about irresponsible journalism!     As I said – few want to talk about what the important aspects of this are to the general public.

A study in the journal “Eating Behaviors” assessed the habits of hundreds of college students and found that more than one third displayed the signs of compulsive exercising – such as exercising despite injuries, feeling guilty about missing a single workout, exercising multiple times a day.

There are many aspects of this that I would like to explore – such as this phenomenon in the older population, the Boomers who want to stay looking and feeling younger.  Research in the article focused on younger women, likely with the thought that for older women we are more concerned about getting them off the couch than worrying if they exercise too much.  I think there are enough women who are seriously into exercising that we cannot ignore this as a potential issue.

The article is long and since I couldn’t find it online to simply link to, I will post/paraphrase sections from the article (along with my dissection of aspects of it) over the next few blog posts.  I hope you will find it stimulating. 

And feel free to add your thoughts and experiences.  If you email me at info@sixpackatsixty.com I will collect up the email contributions and post them as part of a blog post at the end of this series of posts.  (On my NEW blog – currently in production – I plan to have a section for reader contributions – so stay tuned).