Exercise Addiction: When Fitness Becomes an Obsession

by Laura Kaminker

Book Overview

Focuses on exercise addiction and its relationship to eating disorders; explains how compulsive exercise can be harmful and how one can get help to deal with it. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0823927598
• ISBN13: 9780823927593
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Rosen Publishing Group
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.6" x 9.6"
• Age Range: 12 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

Fills a real void

This is an intelligent, careful approach to a topic that is difficult to even imagine as being BAD, in the context of our society of cheeseburger-inhaling lardos. Exercise addiction is a very real thing, however, and this book could easily get someone thinking along more reasonable lines. This book is aimed at a relatively younger target audience, teenagers and people in their early twenties. I think later in life, some different issues can come into play in this kind of addiction, but this book does a pretty solid job of talking to younger people where they're at.I would just like to say here -- for anyone purchasing this book, whether it's for yourself, or for someone else, the most important thing you need to be aware of is the RATIONALIZATIONS that lead to people behaving in this way. Yes, it's important to be cognizant of your actual behaviors, but the rationalizations that lead you to consider what is obviously unbalanced behavior to be perfectly okay constitute a deeper issue. Most likely, your rationalizations come from a disturbing, potent combination of 1.)the work ethic and 2.)youth-glorification. Try to stop and think about what your rationalizations are. You probably often think in terms of "self-improvement." You probably do a lot of goal-setting, like running X amount of miles per week, or something along thiose lines. Probably you're saying things to yourself that place any possibility of your personal happiness far out in the future, after, for example, you have run a marathon. All of these things can be laudable traits, laudable goals, but you need to be able to step outside yourself and get a little perspective. Also -- don't keep constantly thinking about happiness as an inherently "future" state. There is SOME happiness to be gleaned from, for example, completing a marathon, but just don't sacrifice too much of what life has to offer along the way. You need to stop and enjoy being young. You'll only be young once, unless those Buddhists are right... Either way, you need to relax your mind, and leave your body alone. Stop beating yourself up. If you have a overly strong association in your mind between physical fitness and being attrative to the opposite sex... well, okay, there is obviously some correlation between the two, especially at your age. However -- this correlation diminishes a LOT with every passing year after about age 23. If you make an investment in your mind now, instead of your body, it will pay off well in your future.In some ways, what someone might call "exercise addiction" might come from very real forces in your life that simply will not go away for awhile. There are real beliefs, real... well... real realities, that won't change. Some households may put an unusually high premium upon physical fitness, for example. Still, try to keep a sense of perspective. At least TRY to find calmer ways of being happy in the moment, while you're young, and don't be so frenzied.This book is a great idea. Two thumbs