8 Exercise Addiction Symptoms
While exercise is a beneficial habit to work into your lifestyle to prolong your life and decrease the risk of disease, it can become an addiction and cause issues. Decreased risk for cardiovascular disease, decreased blood pressure, decreased cortisol levels, improved sleep, and improved mental health are all evidence-based benefits of regular exercising. All able-bodied people should implement some form of exercise in their life when possible to reap these benefits, but some people take exercise to another level and it quickly becomes an addiction. Just like we should have a healthy relationship with food, we should have a healthy relationship with exercise. It should be done to make us happy and healthy, but we shouldn’t exercise because we feel like we need to. Addictions to exercise stem from bad relationships with food, bad body image, and false information from the media. Here we will discuss how to know what the exercise addiction symptoms are.
Here are 8 exercise addiction symptoms:
1. BODY CHECKING AFTER A WORKOUT
If you run to the mirror after exercising to search for improvements in your physique, this is one of the exercise addiction symptoms. When the motivation behind exercising is to change your body, you will fall into the trap of becoming hyper-focused on what you look like and becoming repeatedly more dissatisfied. The problem with this is that your body type is largely genetic and exercising can only go so far as to modify it. Furthermore, body changes from exercise are going to be negligible after just one workout. Visible changes might first be identified after 6 months of training. Research shows that clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur in the majority of participants who regularly exercise unless a high volume of aerobic activity is achieved. The obsession with exercise will then occur in many people because they do not see changes in their body after only a few weeks, so then they will start to exercise more often and more intensely and therefore exercise can become an obsession.
2. CHOOSING HIGH INTENSITY BECAUSE IT ‘BURNS MORE CALORIES’
Choosing an exercise routine just because it burns more calories is another one of the exercise addiction symptoms. Tracking calories on apple watches and fit bits has been shown to be linked to eating disorder onset because of the focus on numbers and calorie counting. Working out should not be dependent on how many calories you eat or burn because many of the trackers are first of all ineffective, and second of all, the motives behind exercise should not be due to how many calories you burn because the focus is then on the numbers and not how you feel.
Exercise is the most sustainable when you enjoy the type you choose. Extrinsic motivations like body goals and how many calories you burn during the exercise have lower adherence rates than intrinsic motivators like how the exercise makes you feel and how you much you enjoy it. Kids during recess play tag and run around because it is fun, that’s why they adhere to it every day. The same thing should apply to adults. Sticking to a lower impact type of exercise over a longer period of time is going to feel so much better than forcing yourself to do a high-intensity form of exercise that you do not enjoy for a short period of time. You will reap the most benefit from exercise that is consistent, and you’ll be able to be more consistent when you allow yourself the choice to do a fun exercise compared to a harder and more boring exercise.
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3. NOT ALLOWING REST DAYS
Not allowing rest days is another one of the exercise addiction symptoms. Our body needs time to repair and restore our muscle fibers between the days that we train and exercise. This is because exercise puts stress on the body, and the recovery period is where the actual gains occur. If you skip a rest day you are skipping recovery and putting your body under constant stress which is not going to promote the health benefits of exercise. If you are addicted to exercise you will feel the pressure that you need to work out every day because you may be afraid of losing momentum, falling off track, gaining weight, or losing progress. Fortunately, rest assured that taking a day off of exercise each week is necessary and your body will thank you.
4. Exercising While Injured
To go along with the previous point, exercising while injured is another one of the exercise addiction symptoms, especially if the injury was caused by not taking enough rest days to recover. If you feel pain doing day-to-day tasks, but still push through a workout, this shows that you have a strong addiction to exercise as a means for self-validation. For some people, they would rather burn some calories if it means worsening their injury. Choosing exercise over recovery is disadvantageous because, in the end, you will probably worsen your injury and prolong the pain from it even longer.
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5. Depression
Depression is another one of the exercise addiction symptoms because these people view their worth as equal to their training progress. When exercise becomes an addiction, it moves to the top of your priority list above your own wellbeing. This negatively impacts mental health because you become reliant on exercise to make you feel validated and good enough, but at the same time, exercise addiction is formed from never being satisfied that you train enough, to begin with. Exercisers who are injured have a higher chance of developing depression too because being unable to train forces them to recognize that exercise can’t be their only priority in life.
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6. FEELING GUILTY ON A REST DAY
Feeling guilty on a rest day is another one of the exercise addiction symptoms. If you do take rest days, this should not elicit shame or guilt. Rest days are scientifically more beneficial than if you exercise every single day with no day off. The shame you feel during a rest day stems from the obsession that exercise is the only thing that will allow you to reach your fitness or body goals. Having this mindset takes your enjoyment out of exercise and it places your value into the ability to exercise which is unhealthy. Overcoming the fear of rest days is important to restore your relationship with exercise.
7. EXERCISING AFTER EATING ‘TOO MUCH’
If you find yourself going straight to the gym to work out after you ate a bigger meal than usual, this is one of the exercise addiction symptoms. Exercising to ‘cancel’ out a meal is not going to magically erase the food you ate. This pattern can quickly lead to an eating disorder because it mimics behaviors that people with bulimia practice, just with a different vice. Those with bulimia will purge after a big meal to ‘erase’ the food they ate, and in this situation, you are exercising to ‘erase’ the food you ate. These behaviors both lead to bad relationships with food. There is a false perception that the food we eat and will immediately turn to fat if it isn’t ‘healthy’. Eating a piece of cake will not turn into an equally sized mass of fat tissue on our body. You have to eat a very large amount of food over time in order to see fat mass building up on your body. Many times people will mistake bloating or water retention after a meal as fat gain, which will result in people thinking that they need to exercise immediately to cancel it out. Fortunately, if you just wait a few hours you will notice the bloating go down naturally without exercise. In the end, you should not exercise to cancel out the food you eat, because this will damage your relationship with food and exercise.
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8. WEIGHING YOURSELF AFTER EXERCISE
Lastly, weighing yourself after exercise is another one of the exercise addiction symptoms. Weight on the scale fluctuates based on more things than just fat loss and gain. That number encompasses water weight, muscle mass, amount of food still digesting in the gut, bone density, and fat mass. Now if you weigh yourself after a workout, this weight on the scale may go down, but this will mainly be from water loss through sweat. In addition, depending on the exercise you do, you may not be burning any fat during the workout, to begin with. Our body usually will break down stored carbohydrates in the body first before the fat stores are even utilized. For reference, there is typically about a day’s worth of carbohydrate stored in your body at one time in the liver and muscle, which will be burned off within a 45-minute workout usually. Checking your weight after exercise emphasizes that you are not working out for pleasure and that you are focused on numbers, which is one of the exercise addiction symptoms.
