Healthy Addiction?

Health is a blessing, and a birthright for the fortunate. But, sometimes this journey into health becomes a detrimental excursion into workout addiction.

Ladies, have you ever experienced an inner dialogue that goes a little something like this:

“If I could lose 5 lbs, I would be happier.”

“If I could turn my abs into a bangin’ six pack, guys would be more interested in me.”

“If I could do cardio everyday, and strength train three times a week I know I would feel better about myself.”

And, if somewhere within, you find the discipline to make all of these things happen, for many of my Type A sisters, you will probably discover two things simultaneously:

1) That your inner dialogue was right, and you have achieved the desired states of happiness, attention, and self-respect.

2) That these states are short lived.

And, just like any other addict, what do you do? You go looking for another fix. A good fix, in this case, is the high you feel when you have successfully disciplined yourself and achieved yet another goal. These fixes can range from feeling thrilled that you successfully deprived your body of 1000 calories in a single day, or that you were able to get two workouts in before nine p.m., or that you burned off the same amount of calories you ate in that piece of your friend’s birthday cake the night before.

Don’t get me wrong; there is a time and a place for caloric restriction and increasing physical activity. But, as a lifestyle, chronic depravation—it is a dead end.

So why do we do it? Why do we dedicate ourselves to countless hours in the gym, or feel a surge of pride and accomplishment when we successfully send ourselves into starvation. This is just weird! But, I think that we shackle our legs to the treadmill, and mentally stomach-staple ourselves mostly out of fear. Fear that we don’t measure up to the ideal.

It was only when I had lost the five pounds, had the bangin’ six-pack, and was executing my workouts perfectly, that I realized that it wasn’t enough. This realization brought me to my next goal of losing ten more lbs, getting a twelve-pack (I didn’t care if that was “impossible”), and doing a.m. and p.m. workouts five days a week. Crazy, right? More like obsessed, and with every pound I dropped and every ripple I added onto my stomach, the more depressed I got.