Checking Your Exercise Sanity
How to Beat the Body Image Demons and Keep Your Life Balance
You may be fit but are you well? Athletes and fitness devotees need to make sure their dedication doesn't "tip over" into an unhealthy attitude towards training.
There is no question that people who train or exercise regularly tend to have a better mental outlook than the general population. Although no one is immune from mental illnesses such as depression, athletes are more likely to have higher self-esteem and less likely to suffer frequent low moods or to abuse drugs or alcohol.
Unfortunately, as you grow fitter or more successful in sport, the motivation that led you to start training can get muddled with other personal issues and societal expectations. Here’s how it can happen and what you can do to prevent it.
Body Image Closes In
Let’s assume you are on a serious training programme, have survived the initial physical and motivational challenges and are starting to achieve results. Chances are you will be looking different from when you started. You will be leaner or more muscular, and you may have broadened your circle of associates to include people who especially value these attributes. Athletes and non athletes, influenced by ideals of physical beauty in some sports or simply cultural values, are likely to comment on your new shape.
That’s fine, but you need to keep such comments in perspective. According to Dr. Doreen Wiggins, “one of the biggest threats to the health of women athletes stems from the desire to achieve a specific body image.” Women athletes striving to be too thin can fall prey to the triad of eating disorders, disruption of their menstrual cycle and osteoporosis or low bone mass. Men, more likely to be concerned about being underweight, are not immune from over-focusing on body image.
The problem is that achieving the perfect body can very quickly become the focus of training. As such perfection is never achieved, training and exercise can become an obsession. The initial motivation, the desire to have more energy or achieve a specific goal, can get lost in the body image “noise.”
Pulling Back From The Edge
Avoiding the tipping point involves a re-examination of your reasons for training and a re-commitment to achieving a balance between exercise and other facets of life.
As tennis legend Martina Navratilova asked in her book Shape Your Self (London: Time Warner, 2006): “Who are you and what is driving you?”
Perhaps you did begin exercising to assist with weight loss. There’s nothing wrong with weight loss, unless it becomes an unsatisfiable goal rather than a pathway to optimal health.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has done theoretical work developing definitions of sanity. It's an idea for which (he comments) there is “no particular enthusiasm…in our society.” Although he does not write specifically about body image and exercise obsession issues, some of Phillips' ideas are useful here. For example: “perhaps we should value sanity...for the questions it forces us to face about how we want to live and who we want to be.”
We are likely, Phillips writes in his 2005 book Going Sane (New York: Harper Collins) “to describe our appetites as more akin to madness” rather than to accept that people naturally have strong competitive wants.
Such societal attitudes may actually sanction exercise-addiction as a kind of psychic anaesthetic or self-control mechanism, rather than exercise being valued as a means to achieve life goals. Hence the importance of figuring out what your goals actually are, and using exercise and training to expand rather than to limit your life experience.
The question of whether you still have a healthy attitude towards training (or your motivations have become muddled) cannot be answered in terms of, for example, the number of hours a week you exercise. Swimmers and endurance athletes may often need to train twice a day to achieve their objectives. What is needed is an honest look at why you are training and how it is affecting your life.
Not an easy objective, but a good long-term investment in attaining your goals and staying well.
