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Last updated on June 27th, 2025 at 07:52 pm
Pro Ana workouts are dangerous and potentially deadly. Pro Ana workouts are intentionally designed to combine rigorous exercise with very low calorie intake. Pro ana workouts can be addicting and even life threatening.
The distinguisher between pro ana pro mia workouts and simply engaging in compulsive exercise (a common eating disorder behavior) is the community factor. Pro ana workouts are often created by people with eating disorders for people with eating disorders and distributed amongst these communities. These rigid, intense and dangerous routines are then reinforced for adherence amongst eating disorder community members.
The common traits of an eating disorder workout routine is they are often:
- Competitive
- Repetitive (often a single repetitive activity is chosen and sustained such as walking)
- Community building (promoted and shared amongst pro ana/mia groups to normalize)
- Rigid (you can’t skip a day)
- Specific (e.g. I must walk 20,000 steps daily)
Breaking the regidity and disengaging in any communities that promote, rigid, intense, and otherwise harmful exercise habits will be critical for breaking free of pro eating disorder workouts.
This article explores common behaviors or eating disorder work outs, dangers of these types of work outs and how to stop excessively exercising for good.
What Is A Pro Ana Workout
Pro Ana workouts include any workout routine that will take place with insufficient fueling in effort to lose weight or bulk up.
Common behaviors of pro ana workouts include:
- Exercising while fasting
- Intentionally dehydrating yourself to meet certain goal weights
- Improper refueling after an intense work out
- Insufficient carbohydrate intake to support your workout
- Compulsive exercising
- Insufficient calorie intake
- Female athlete triad in women athletes
- Use of other compensatory methods like diet pills and laxatives to get rid of calories
Energy deficits often seen in pro ana workouts can impair performance, growth, reproductive health, and overall health.
Common Goals of Pro Ana Exercise
A person that seeks out pro ana routines are often interested in:
- Losing weight rapidly
- Maintain an ematiated body
- Tone “problem areas”
- “Bulking up”
- Following male thinspo trends
- Fitting into specific sizes
- Feel the endorphine rush from intense exercise
- Engage in self harm by purposely pushing the body past its physical limits
Common Risks With Pro Eating Disorder Exercise
Pro ana exercise can have extremely negative health impacts on your body and are often downright dangerous or even deadly.
Some common dangerous traits of eating disorder workouts include:
- Loss of menstrual cycle
- Decreased bone mineral density
- Low energy
- Fatigue
- Dangerously low blood sugars could result in fainting, coma or death
- Headaches
- Nausea
- Injury
- Decreased immune function
- Hair loss
- Muscle wasting
- Feeling cold constantly
- Long dark hair growth on the body (lanugo)
- Difficulty maintaining social relationships
- Sexual dysfunction
- Infertility
- Extreme hunger
- Fractures
- Osteoporosis
- Heart Failure
- Kidney Failure
- Vitamin and mineral deficiencies
- Improper hydration could lead to heat illnesses, electrolyte imbalances or death
Some of these risks with excessiveexercise can be life lasting. If you have been engaging in excessive exercise, a dexa scan may be necessary to rule out permanent loss of bone mass and take action to preserve bone health.
How To Stop My Pro ED workout Routine
When you’re ready to stop compulsive exercise it’s important you work with your eating disorder dietitian to help you create a meal plan which will support your current level of activty as safely as possible.
In a perfect recovery world completely stopping all activty until we are fully recovered is the gold standard, but this is unrealistic for most. It is sometimes easier to focus on reducing activity or increasing calories one step at a time.
Steps that will help us stop compulsive exercise include:
- Challenge the rigidity of your routine (if you usually walk excessively, challenge yourself to do yoga instead)
- Get rid of pedometers and exercise tracking apps
- If you’re not ready to get rid of a pedometor yet, practice covering it up for part of the day with tape or a band aid
- Change the time of day you exercise
- Track your exercise habits (and begin to decrease the intensity and/or duration)
- Stop body checking (cover your mirrors, get rid of tape measures, do a social media purge, track the number of times you body check)
- Stop counting calories (both tracking calories eaten and calories burned)
Hydration and Pro Ana Workouts
A serious, life threatening complication of excessive exercise while you have an eating disorder is improper hydration. Dangeous electrolyte shifts can quickly happen for people with eating disorders, especially after a bout of intense exercise.
If you have anorexia, your body is in starvation mode. This means you might not be taking in enough electrolytes through food or fluids (sodium, potassium). Low intake of sodium and potassium combined with exercise that can lead to drinking excessive amounts of can lead to hyponatremia, which can quickly become life threatening.
Overhydration is just as dangerous as underhydration when it comes to exercise. People exercising with an eating disorder are also at risk for hypernatremia (excessive electrolytes per fluid volume). This can come as a result of excessive sweating during exercise, or not wanting to replinish fluid lost during exercise as it can lead to pressure on the belly and increased weights.
Under hydration which can also cause heat illness as a result of improper hydration.You should not presume just because you are drinking a lot of water you are not at risk for improper hydration during excessive exercise.
To further complicate things, If you are purging through vomiting or laxative abuse this can further complicate hydration and put you at increased risk of heat illness, injury, or death with excessive exercise.
Should I stop Exercising If I Have An Eating Disorder
Yes.
You should not be exercising if you have an eating disorder or are in recovery from an eating disorder. However, this is often easier said than done and might take some steps to get there.
Exercise should not begin again until you are:
- Fully weight restored (including any overshoot weight needed for organ and tissue repair)
- You are no longer exercising to punish your body or because you hate your body
- You are no longer constantly body checking
- You no longer feel like you need to earn your food through exercise
A good way to know if you are ready to begin exercise again is to make a list of your top 5 reasons for wanting to exercise. If reason #1 or #2 is to lose weight or bulk up, it is not the right time to begin exercise.
If you are looking for eating disorder recovery motivation tips, check out these eating disorder recovery books.
Knowing how to tell someone you have an eating disorder can also be very difficult, but having the right support is key to recovery.
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