Activity Disorder: Too Much/Little Of A Good Thing

Accompanying with the steady increase in the number of people with eating disorders has been a rise in the number of people with exercise disorders: people who are controlling their bodies, altering their moods, and defining themselves through their overinvolvement in exercise activity, to the point where instead of choosing to participate in their activity, they have become "addicted" to it, continuing to engage in it despite adverse consequences. If dieting taken to the extreme becomes an eating disorder, exercise activity taken to the same extreme may be viewed as an activity disorder, a term used by Alayne Yates in her book Compulsive Exercise and the Eating Disorders (1991).

In our society, exercise is increasingly being sought, less for the pursuit of fitness or pleasure and more for the means to a thinner body or sense of control and accomplishment. Female exercisers are particularly vulnerable to problems arising when restriction of food intake is combined with intense physical activity. A female who loses too much weight or body fat will stop menstruating and ovulating and will become increasingly susceptible to stress fractures and osteoporosis. Yet, similar to individuals with eating disorders, those with an activity disorder are not deterred from their behaviors by medical complications and consequences.

People who continue to overexercise in spite of medical and/or other consequences feel as if they can't stop and that participating in their activity is no longer an option. These people have been referred to as obligatory or compulsive exercisers because they seem unable to "not exercise," even when injured, exhausted, and begged or threatened by others to stop. The terms pathogenic exercise and exercise addiction have been used to describe individuals who are consumed by the need for physical activity to the exclusion of everything else and to the point of damage or danger to their lives.

The term anorexia athletica has been used to describe a subclinical eating disorder for athletes who engage in at least one unhealthy method of weight control, including fasting, vomiting, diet pills, laxatives, or diuretics. For the rest of this chapter, the term activity disorder will be used to describe the overexercising syndrome as this term seems most appropriate for comparison with the more traditional eating disorders.