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Last updated on January 25th, 2025 at 11:08 pm
Compulsive exercising is the ritualistic practice of movement where energy burned through exercise exceeds the energy consumed through food regularly. Once you start, it can feel impossible to know how to stop compulsive exercise.
Compulsive exercise is characterized by:
- Energy burned by exercise far exceeds energy intake through food
- Guilt and shame for missed exercise
- Altering food based on exercise routines
Excessive exercise is often a sign of an eating disorder. You may feel like you hate your body and the only way to improve your body image is through vigorous physical activity.
This article explores what compulsive exercise is, how exercise shows up in an eating disorder, and ways to treat an exercise addiction.
What is Compulsive Exercise
Compulsive exercise can best be defined as “you just can’t stop” when it comes to your routine for moving your body. Compulsive exercise is one form of purging in eating disorders.
Exercise Addiction Behaviors:
- Restricting food if a workout is missed
- High levels of exercise without the food intake to match exercise demands
- Exercising multiple hours per day
- Feeling guilt and shame if exercise is missed
- Exercising multiple times per day
- Feeling obligated to exercise even if sick or injured
- Having a certain heart rate or calories burned threshold that must be met
- Hiding the frequency and intensity of exercise routines from others
Compulsive exercise is not the same as a high-intensity workout or sport. While competitive sports may require high training levels, the athlete is properly fueling through food to make sure energy needs are being met.
A person who is experiencing overexercise addiction will feel out of control. The symptoms of the condition will interfere with every aspect of their lives. Their social, mental, and physical health will be at risk.
A person who is compulsively exercising will spend a significant portion of their day (70% or greater) thinking about working out, restricting their food, changing their body, or all of these things.
Is Exercise Addiction The Same as Compulsive Exercise
Yes.
The terms exercise addiction and compulsive exercise can often be used interchangeably.
Excessive exercise is also sometimes referred to as over-exercise, pro ana exercise, or exercise dependence.
Exercise Addiction Causes
There is usually more than one cause for the development of an exercise addiction.
Some things that can trigger compulsive exercise include:
- A desire to shrink or bulk up the body
- Fatphobia
- Genetics
- Diet culture
- Frequent body checking
- Body dysmorphia
- Media showing slim bodies and exercise
- Pressure to participate in sports by family
- High expectations in sports performance by coaches
- Family requiring exercise to access certain foods
- Hating your body
Exercise addiction may or may not be related to the desire to shrink the body. Sometimes, the desire is to bulk up or a certain lean body mass percentage.
While the primary goal of compulsive exercise may not always be to change the body, if body changes interfere with a person’s ability to engage in their exercise routine they will likely then try to manipulate the body size(for example, the perception that weight gain decreases running speeds).
Compulsive Exercise and Eating Disorders
Compulsive exercise is almost always coupled with a disordered relationship with food. People with eating disorders often utilize excessive exercise in response to feeling fat and continuously feeling guilty about food.
Some ways compulsive exercise and eating disorders combine include:
- Feeling like you need to earn your food
- Feeling like you need to burn the same number of calories you eat
- Skipping meals if you don’t exercise
- Feeling like you need to achieve body perfection through exercise and food restriction
- Not stopping exercise until you reach a certain heart rate
- Increasing exercise in response to weighing yourself
If you are experiencing an eating disorder, your eating disorder voice will likely tell you that you are worthless, lazy, and fat if you do not meet a certain exercise level.
This can make decreasing or eliminating exercise feel impossible.
Dangers of Excessive Exercise
Excessive exercise can lead to:
- Female athlete triad
- Decreased bone mineral density
- Loss of period for women
- Low energy and mood
- Binge eating
- Orthorexia (extremely healthy eating)
- Infertility
- Injury
- Abnormal lab values related to starvation
- Suppressed immune system
- Gastroparesis (delayed digestion)
- Starvation Syndrome
It’s important to consider that discontinuing exercise abruptly and/or increasing food intake can have risks of refeeding syndrome. This is a rare condition that can lead to complications during recovery or even death.
It is important to work with a doctor, dietitian, and therapist to help you manage your exercise addiction and recovery.
Mental Changes of Compulsive Exercise
Overexercising changes the brain. This can add an extra layer of difficulty when it comes to trying to stop compulsive exercise.
Mental changes by compulsive exercise include:
- Reduced brain size due to starvation
- Forced use of ketones to fuel the brain versus carbohydrates due to starvation
- Increased impulsivity which heightens reward response from overexercise
All of these mental changes produce a surge of serotonin (the feel-good neurotransmitter) in response to over-exercise which makes it difficult to stop the activity.
Because exercising at high intensity in combination with inadequate food intake can produce a surge of feel-good hormones in the body, it is difficult to convince someone to reduce their activity levels.
People who compulsively exercise will often experience relationship difficulties from their eating disorders as well as physical complications.
Other activities that may have previously felt rewarding will have difficulty eliciting the same level of reward as the rush from an intense workout. It’s important to remember that this is normal. As the brain and body heal, other activities you once enjoyed will again become satisfying.
How To Stop Compulsive Exercise
Some tips to stop compulsive exercise include:
- Avoid repetitive exercises (running, elliptical, cycling)
- If you can’t avoid repetitive exercise, break it up with stretching or other activities in between
- If you feel you must do repetitive exercises, change up the location or time of day
- Change the time of day you exercise
- Change the days of the week you exercise/rest days
- Switch the activity type
- Make exercise social
- Exercise in a different environment
- Discontinuing pedometer use or any other tool that measures exercise if possible
- If you can’t discontinue pedometer use, cover it with a band aid for portions of the day
- Stop counting calories burned and eaten
- Follow a mechanical eating plan tailored for your exercise needs by an eating disorder rd
- Reduce or eliminate all forms of physical activity if possible for a time
- Find other activities instead of exercise that feel rewarding (playing an instrument or game, knitting)
- Don’t compensate for additional food with additional exercise
To stop compulsive exercise, you MUST tackle the underlying reason you are engaging in excessive exercise in the first place. Often excessive exercise routines begin as part of a diet cycle and become more intense over time. Reducing exercise often involves actively working with tools to improve your body image.
If you are experiencing an eating disorder along with compulsive exercise, you will need a qualified team of healthcare experts to support you in your recovery journey.
These motivational recovery quotes can help you to stay strong during this very difficult time of excessive exercise recovery. Recovery books can also lend excellent insight and support in this challenging time.
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