Stay disciplined, not obsessed

 

I've been here before, I know the feeling......sixteen times before I've questioned why I do this sport around 3-4 weeks out from Ironman race day. 

That final prep in the Ironman journey is always a tough time. 

Whereas my previous racing block (three 70.3's in 7 weeks) kept the motivation high for training, the past three weeks have been all about embracing the grind. I'm extremely thankful that I have not had any physical setbacks since the summer of 2019 and after 15 years, I am still passionate about long distance triathlon training and racing. A lot of that comes from having such a great playground for biking and running. But that doesn't mean that this last training block was smooth sailing. 

There was self-doubt, there was fatigue, there was soreness and there were some niggles. But through it all, I've been consistently showing up and letting my body and mind work out their differences. However, on Friday last week, my body said "not today" and my mind agreed. I enjoyed the entire day off from any type of exercise and it felt amazing. It's funny how life gives you recovery days when you need them the most. 

As I countdown the weeks until Ironman #17, I can't help but think about the discipline that is needed to train for a 140.6 mile event. It takes a lot of focus, resiliency and persistence. While the motivation is high at the beginning, you really have to keep your "why" in mind when the real fatigue sets in. 

Every athlete needs a high level of dedication, passion, desire and commitment in order to perform at a high level or to physically meet the demands of a long distance race. For many athletes, the motivation to athletically succeed is borderline obsession. Since training for an athletic event may resemble excessive exercise, you may forget your "why" and instead, be grinding along with an unhealthy obsession.

For every athlete, it can be difficult to understand whether or not your discipline and struggle is "normal." 

Since training requires placing intentional training stress on the body, it's important to recognize that something is not "normal" when training becomes unenjoyable and instead, feels like a chore or obligation.

Training for an Ironman should not be combined with feeling the need to control everything - from metrics to body weight. I've learned a lot from Ironman distance racing and one thing comes to mind - you can't control what happens during a 140.6 mile event. For the athlete who is seeking performance gains, it's completely normal to be disciplined to your training. Persistence and consistency are two sure ways to gain fitness and confidence for race day.

However, tying self-worth to physical performance and/or a body image, while obsessively comparing your fitness, metrics or body image to another athlete (or a past version of yourself) is a sign that training is an obsession. 

As a sport dietitian who often works with athletes who are experiencing the negative mental, emotional and physical consequences of severely altering the diet and training excessively in route to an ultra endurance event, it's important to explore the shift, when a natural desire to be better turns obsessive and excessive.

Passion turned obsession

• Overexercising to the point that fulfilling sport-related goals become more important than almost anything else in life.
• Training is specifically used to control body weight.
• Training provides a sense of power, control and self-respect.
• Constant obsession with food and weight.
• Refusal to miss a workout no matter what.
• Difficulty/inability scaling back workouts due to sickness, injury, fatigue or poor sleep.
• Conflicts between family, friends, kids and/or training partners or feeling alienated.
• Anxiety and guilt when a workout is missed or if exercise volume isn't high "enough".
• Little to no enjoyment for exercise, but continues to train/exercise anyways.
• Haphazard training with little structure/quality to training.
• Self-worth is tied to physical performance, race results, training metrics or body image.
• Constant comparison to other athletes (ex. Strava, social media).
• Lack of satisfaction with personal achievements.
• Rigid food rules and dietary restriction.
• Feeling out of control in many areas of life.
• Denial that there is a problem.
• Never feeling good enough.

Understanding that it is very difficult to differentiate between "disciplined" and "obsessive," I encourage you to explore your current lifestyle (and mindset) to determine whether your current eating patterns and training regime is serving you well. Yes, you will need to make a few extra sacrifices at times in your long distance training journey but the global context of race day readiness should not feel like an addiction. 

To get to the root of your "why" explore your feelings of self acceptance and athletic worthiness to understand if your body image struggles and/or exercise obsession is tied to your body image, lack of self-believe or poor self-esteem.

Training for an athletic event should be a challenging. It's not going to always be easy. But it should also be a fun and enjoyable experience for your body, AND for those around you, who care, love and support you. Sport does not discriminate among body types or fitness levels. If you have recently found yourself paying more attention to your appearance, metrics or race goal than to your own health or enjoyment of the process, your desire to become a better athlete may have shifted into an unhealthy obsession. Too much of anything can be negative so it's important to be able to differentiate between an unhealthy addiction to exercises versus a healthy discipline to train. 

Can you be too driven to succeed?

Drive is often the fuel that keeps you motivated to achieve a goal. But a powerful need to succeed can be driven by a fear of failure or constantly comparing yourself to others (or a past version of yourself). The more successful you become in each step of your athletic journey, the more afraid of failure you can become. As a result, you may find yourself compromising your values - and your mental and physical health. The state of being driven can become addictive. 

Being intrinsically motivated is required in any successful individual. To work hard and relentlessly pursue a goal with determination is a great quality. 

Although drive can be a great thing (when you use it in the right ways), it can also lead to a single-focused mindset. When you are too driven, it can be difficult to switch "off" which can make it difficult to respect your health and well-being. 

As an athlete, the competitive nature and strong discipline that can make you a great athlete may also place you at risk for obsessive exercise and disordered eating. 

Athletes tend to exhibit unique traits that help them succeed in sport. For example, self-discipline, obsession, driven to succeed and motivation are admirable characteristics that keep you working hard for a goal. However, individuals with these personality features may also be predisposed to being perfectionistic and self-critical. Athletes with these features may compare appearance and current fitness status against unrealistic standards. Although many athletes are self-critical and want to live up to their own ideals, expectations and goals, it's not uncommon for athletes to be heavily concerned about what other people (athletes, coaches, friends, family) think of them.

Being too driven can increase the risk rigid eating and over-exercising. Your drive to succeed can become an obstacle that stands in the way of your success.

It's not uncommon for driven athletes to become hyper-focused or obsessed with food and with the idea of controlling eating to reach a performance, health or body composition goal. Inflexible thinking increases the tendency of making decisions with an all or nothing, black or white mentality. As a result, any deviation from self-imposed rules becomes an unacceptable failure. With a strict set of standards that you strive to meet, your constant drive to improve can lead to a dissatisfaction when you fail to meet your high expectations and goals. As a result, this adds fuel to the fire and perpetuates a stronger drive toward perfection and control. It can be difficult for the highly driven athlete to accept suggestions or advice from well-meaning professionals - keeping you in a cycle of self-sabotage. 

There's nothing wrong with being motivated, driven and dedicated. But when a level of perfectionism shows up in your eating habits and exercise regime, being too driven can do more harm than good. Add in the pressure of wanting to be lean due to sport and societies obsession with thinness and you can understand how your good intentions can lead to unhealthy outcomes. 

Taking health risks for a perceived competitive edge will make you lose in the long run. No matter your athletic goals or fitness level, you should not have to prioritize your athletic development over your well-being. 

If this speaks to you, I create a program to help you get more out of your training without compromising your mental and physical health. Through The Whole Athlete 6-lesson course, you will learn how diet culture, a societal obsession with health and the chase for an ideal race weight are negatively impacting your training, mental well-being and physical health. Once you understand why you think how you think about food, health and your body, you can fix the distorted views that you've developed with food and your body. 

Learn more HERE. 

Performance focused: Are you exercising or training?

 

I think it's safe to say that most endurance athletes love physical activity. Certainly it would be difficult to train for a long-distance event if there wasn't a strong passion for working out. But with great enthusiasm to exercise comes a caveat - just because you are exercising, this doesn't mean you are becoming race ready. 

Exercise (or physical activity) is commonly defined as anything that requires you to move your body and burn calories.

Training is viewed as working toward adequate levels of strength, endurance, speed and/or power for successful participation (and completion) of an athletic event. 

To make the difference easier to understand, exercising satisfies an immediate need and is done for the effect is produces today. Exercise is done for its own sake - either during or immediately after. But when you have a specific performance objective in mind (ex. preparing for an event), you must change your physiology to prepare for the demands of your event. 

Although all training is exercising, not all exercising is training. 

Training is done with the purpose of achieving a long-term performance goal. Training is a process that must be planned out to produce specific results. It's methodically organized with great thought and understanding of human body.  

Preparing for an endurance event requires a specific type of physiological adaptation. Every workout needs to have a purpose. Not all workouts require intervals or high intensity efforts but there needs to be a motive behind each workout in the plan. This is training. There's nothing wrong with working out with the primary objective of getting into shape, improving health or changing body composition, but if the primary purpose of the workout is to only burn calories or do what "feels right" on the day, this not only prevents performance improvements but it can also compromise health and emotional well-being.

The difference between exercising and training is how you approach the activity - not the activity itself. 

Training requires intention, purpose and focus. It requires planning of nutrition, commitment to the task at hand and a smart mindset to listen to the body. If you want to improve your health, exercising will do just that. But you don't have to train for an Ironman distance triathlon or marathon to be healthy. And just because you train for an Ironman distance triathlon or marathon, this doesn't mean that you will remain healthy (or become healthier). Training requires putting your body under a specific type of intentional load, forcing it to adapt through training stress and recovery. Not always is this healthy. That is why training requires so much more than just checking off workouts for the sake of completing a certain number of training miles or hours. 

Although endurance athletes are experiencing many changes to life, training and mental health during the pandemic, I do worry that many endurance athletes have turned into exceptional "exercisers." While it's great to stay physically active during a time of cancelled races, if you are seeking short or long-term performance improvements, there needs to be a systematic plan in place - with purpose and intent. Exercising your way through high volume, intense or random workouts will not give you the results that training can offer. More so, health can be compromised if you are not focused on the factors that can help your body safely adapt to training - like daily nutrition, sport nutrition, sleep, stress management, hydration and recovery.

Training takes work, it requires a committed mindset, it involves diligence with lifestyle habits (outside of training), results are not quick to achieve and it requires a certain amount of "embracing the grind."

But, with a structured plan and long-term goals in place, every training session provides an opportunity for growth and development.

And this is why training is fun - achieving a performance result when it truly matters, while also keeping the body in great health. 

When training becomes excessive and obsessive

Every athlete needs a high level of dedication, passion, desire and commitment in order to perform at a high level in training and on race day. For many athletes, the motivation to athletically succeed is borderline obsession. Since training for an athletic event may resemble excessive exercise, an unhealthy obsession with exercise may go unnoticed by a coach, training partner or friend. You may even think that your commitment to training is normal and even encouraged by your coach and those who look up to you as a fitness role model.

For every athlete, it can be difficult to understand whether or not your motivation and commitment to your sport is "normal", especially since many athletes are interested in diet and training strategies in order to improve health or performance.

Excessive exercise has many health consequences, such as bone and muscle injuries, hormonal issues, cardiac and other organ problems. On the mental side, the addiction to exercise may cause withdraw, isolation, loneliness, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and guilt.

Since the need to train (or exercise) is necessary to help you mentally and physically prepare for your upcoming event(s), all athletes should recognize that something is not normal when training becomes unenjoyable and instead feels like a chore or obligation.

Athletes who tend to overexercise will use exercise as a way to feel a sense of control over their body. In other words, life feels so out of control that diet and exercise need to be tightly regulated to avoid feelings of guilt and anxiety. For the athlete who is seeking performance gains, it's completely normal to want to become more dedicated to training and healthy eating, in order to feel athletically ready for an upcoming event. Persistence and consistency are two sure ways to gain fitness and confidence for race day.

However, now a days, it seems like more athletes are tying self-worth to physical performance and/or a body image, while obsessively comparing to a "successful" athlete or a past version of themselves. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, coaches can add fuel to the obsession by encouraging the athlete to train harder or longer or to adhere to a strict, rigid or controlled diet in order to reach x-goal by race day. When a coach (or magazine article) suggests that an athlete can become a better athlete through training and nutrition, it's easy for an exercise addicted athlete to exercise more and to restrict food and create food rules, in an effort to perform better.

As a sport dietitian who often works with athletes who are experiencing the negative mental, emotional and physical consequences of severely altering the diet and training excessively, it's important to explore the shift, when a natural desire to be better turns obsessive and excessive.

For example, here are some symptoms of Anorexia Athletica, which co-exists with disordered eating patterns and is characterized by obsessive and excessive exercising and often co-occurs with calorie restriction, induced vomiting and body image issues.

• Overexercising to the point that fulfilling sport-related goals become more important than almost anything else in life.
• Exercise is specifically used to control body weight. 
• Exercise provides a sense of power, control and self-respect.
• Constant obsession with food and weight. 
• Refusal to miss a workout.
• Difficulty scaling back workouts due to sickness, injury, fatigue or poor sleep.
• Conflicts between family, friends, kids and/or training partners or feeling alienated. 
• Anxiety and guilt when a workout is missed or if exercise volume isn't "enough".
• Little to no enjoyment for exercise but continues to train/exercise. 
• Haphazard training with little structure/quality. 
• Self-worth is tied to physical performance and body image. 
• Constant comparison to other athletes. 
• Lack of satisfaction with personal achievements. 
• Rigid food rules and dietary restriction
• Feeling out of control in many areas of life. 
• Denial that there is a problem. 
• Never feeling good enough.

Whereas many athletes take diet and training to the extreme in order to improve performance, other athletes may use exercise to feel better about body image and weight, thus creating an addiction to exercise, often along with calorie/food group restriction, in order to boost self-esteem. Athletes may even use words like "eating clean" or "getting back on track", never realizing that there is an underlying issue that needs to be explored. 

Understanding that it is very difficult to define "excessive and obsessive" exercise among highly competitive, dedicated and motivated athletes, I encourage you to explore your current lifestyle to determine whether your current eating patterns and training regime is helping you achieve (or move closer) to an optimal level of performance and athletic readiness without sabotaging your health and quality of life. With far too many coaches wrongly encouraging athletes to lose weight and increase training loads in order to become faster or stronger, you should never ever have to take extreme measures to become a better athlete. 

What you believe about your appearance, how you feel about your body and how you feel in your body are important components to athletic success. Exercising more, adhering to rigid food rules and restricting calories will never help you appreciate and feel proud of your body. To get to the root of your exercise addiction issues, explore your feelings of self acceptance and athletic worthiness to understand if your dieting desires and inner belief that you are not training "enough" are tied to your body image and poor self-esteem. 

Training for an athletic event should be a challenging, fun and enjoyable experience for your body AND for those around you, who care, love and support you. Sport does not discriminate among body types or fitness levels. If you have recently found yourself paying more attention to your appearance than to your own health and/or performance or comparing yourself to other athletes, never feeling fast, strong, lean or good enough, your desire to become a better athlete may have shifted into an unhealthy obsession. Too much of anything can be negative so it's important to be able to differentiate between an unhealthy addiction to exercises versus a healthy desire to perform at your best, with great self-esteem and a great relationship with food and the body. 

My body obsession

source

Ever since a young age, I have loved learning about the human body, especially a moving human body.
In 1999, just shy of turning 18 years old and a year away from graduating from High School, my birthday present was a book titled "New Atlas of Human Anatomy" which came with a CD ROM explaining all the human body systems. 

I read that book every night, over and over again.

Throughout my undergraduate years at Transylvania University, in Lexington, KY, I couldn't get enough from my exercise science classes. Every topic was interesting and exciting and as a student athlete, I was able to apply almost everything that I learned to class to "real world" situations.

While majoring in Exercise Science, I quickly fell in love with strength and conditioning which gave me aspirations to be a strength and conditioning coach. Forced to start strength training at the age of 10 as part of my swim team conditioning helped me appreciate the health and performance benefits of a properly designed strength training program.
(I've been strength training for nearly 24 years!)
I remember interning at the University of Kentucky with the men's and women's basketball and cheerleader teams, which gave me a lot of hands-on experience in writing strength training programs for athletes (most of those athletes towered at least 1-2 feet over me). 

When I graduated from college with a Bachelor degree in Exercise Science and a Minor in Psychology, my quest for learning was not complete.

In the fall of 2004, off I went to graduate school in sunny and warm, Davie, FL at Florida Atlantic University.

While studying to earn my Master's in Exercise Physiology, I worked as a research assistant. In addition to my classes, which required me to get familiar with all the testing equipment in the  laboratory, I spent many long days and nights collecting research, and testing subjects, for research studies. 

Sometimes, I was even able to test myself.

Although my love tank for exercise physiology was filled to the top while in graduate school, something was missing....my own athletic pursuits.

Although my free time was limited during graduate school, I just wasn't feeling complete.
The athlete part of me was missing as I was only a student.

Seeing that I spent the last 22 years of my life competing in sports, I knew that I needed to find something that would physically challenge me.

Well, since my longest swimming events lasted anywhere from one-minute to 2.5-minutes (or 60-150 seconds) and my longest ever run was a 10K (less than an hour), I thought, why not.....
I'll train for a marathon!

If I can run 6 miles, what's 20 more miles??

It only took a matter of time before an endurance bug bit me hard. 

By the end of 2006, I had completed the Boston Marathon, my first half IM and my first Ironman (which qualified me for the 2007 Ironman World Championship). 

But here I go again....

In 2008, I found myself once again feeling lost without school. 

I was convinced that the athlete part of me was here to stay as I found great joy as an age-group triathlete and runner but I still felt that I needed to learn more about the human body.

Rather than going the PhD route, I decided to follow my new found passion in nutrition, thanks to endurance sports (and a few bonky workouts) sparking a need to learn more about sport nutrition.

Fast forward to June 2011, after three arduous years of learning, studying, paper writing, interning (9-months) and test taking, I finally received my RD credential.

With an ultimate goal of becoming Board Certified in Sport Nutrition, I waited and worked until I was eligible to apply, study and then sit for the CSSD exam, which I successfully passed last summer.

So why do I write all of this?

Every Olympic year (in addition to any big competition in the sports of running, track, swimming, cycling or triathlon), I find myself itching to learn more.
I LOVE watching the human body in motion.

My obsession with the human body will never go away because there is so much to learn as it applies to the physiology of the body during exercise.

When I see the human body, I don't see what's on the outside.

Perhaps to most people, efficient movements, a lean physique and defined and sculpted muscles are easily seen by the human eye.
When simply looking at the body image, it's easy to look at the outside of the body and associate words like fast, strong, high, powerful and skilled with the athlete.

But within the body is a very complex system that always, sometimes, most of the time or rarely works smoothly.

This is why I always feel it is necessary to thank the body as there is great physiology complexity when you want your body to go long, far, easy or hard.
Many times, it is easy to take your human body for granted.

Sadly, many people abuse, overwork, undernourish, bash or hate their body.

What's interesting about the human body is that it can be trained, physically, but also mentally.
And for the body's metabolic systems, among many other things, to work efficiently, there needs to be water and energy, supplied from food and many times, sport nutrition, to support the many complex movements that are needed for a given sport.

The most beautiful thing about the human body is that it is not perfect.
There is not one size fits all sport.
The human body comes in all shapes and sizes and there is a sport for everyone.

Starting tomorrow, for the next 17 days, the 2016 Olympic games will be feeding my body obsession as I watch, marvel, learn and study the many bodies in motion.

Athletes from all of the world will be putting many years, if not a lifetime, of hard work, dedication, money, time, energy and effort, all to compete in their chosen sport, to be the absolute best athlete they can be.....with their one and only human body.

When passion turns obsession

As athletes, we often following a rigid schedule of working out, balanced with a preoccupation with food and body image as it relates to physical performance and overall health. 

For many athletes, patterns of exercise obsession and disordered eating coincide with the race season with a heightened awareness of how workouts, food and body composition positively (or negatively) affect performance.

When your passion turns into an obsession, see this as a wake-up call that you may be taking your health to an unhealthy place. Sense of worth or ability to succeed should not be tied with a fixed number of hours/miles completed per week or a specific body composition or number on the scale. 

If you feel frustrated, anxious or overwhelmed if you miss a workout or find yourself constantly criticizing your body composition, you may be putting yourself into situations where your life is controlled by workout, food and body perfection rather than being focused on development. 

The perfect training and eating regime is the one where you can experience performances gains without compromising overall health.

There is a big difference between eating for performance/health and training for performance gains and living an unmanageable life because of the compulsive drive to maintain a high level of fitness and specific body image. 

Whereas it may look as if you or an athlete you know is trying to achieve optimal performance through his/her actions to be competitive at his/her upcoming races and he/she is being extremely dedicated and committed to training and eating, this passion could be turning into an obsession. 

There is no simple solution to disordered eating and exercise obsession. 

Left untreated there is a high risk of serious health consequences and performances declines.  

Warning signs for a passion turned obsession

-Frequently commenting (out loud or internal dialogue) about your body weight/image or comparing to another athlete's body image
-Feeling extreme pressure to perform/look a certain way from your coach/teammate or yourself

-Loss of a significant amount of body weight

-Difficulty maintaining a healthy weight

-Ritualistic habits and preoccupation with food, calories, cooking and eating

-Sacrificing sleep, relationships and/or work for workouts
-Inability to be flexible with workout intensity/volume

-Training through injury, sickness or fatigue

-Compulsive need to workout or anxiety that you are never doing enough training to feel physically ready for your upcoming race.

-Refusal to fuel before, during and after workouts for fear of gaining weight (or feeling uncomfortable ingesting calories when burning calories) 

-Sporadic or constant episodes of binge eating, purging, emotional eating or food restriction

-Severe mood shifts often tied with exercise or meal times. 

-Chronic fatigue, injuries or sickness

-Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat. Constant obsession of losing weight or becoming lean

-Loss of menstrual cycle (amenorrhea) which can come from not meeting energy needs, not necessarily from being "underweight" relative to height. 

-Hormonal issues and loss of sexual drive

-Changes in hair/skin health

-Altered labs (calcium, thyroid, iron/ferritin, estrogen, testosterone, vitamin D, etc.)
-Constipation and GI issues

-Dehydration, bonking, fatigue, headache and other underfueling symptoms that may be dismissed as "normal" associated with training

It's important to note that body weight and fitness level are not directly correlated with eating disorders/disordered eating or exercise obsession. 

Do not assume that just because you are a beginner athlete or if you are over your healthy weight that you are not at risk for health issues related to exercise obsession and disordered eating.
Additionally, some experienced and lean athletes do an exceptional job of staying healthy with eating and are able to train hard but rest/recover harder. 

As an athlete, you likely have your own standards and expectations as to how you want to look, how much you want to train and how you want to perform on race day all in an effort to discover personal physical success. 

There is nothing wrong with being passionate and dedicated to your sport and eating regime. 

But if your intentional "performance boosting" actions are negatively affecting your health, energy and physical performance as well as quality of life and interactions with others, it's important that you reach out to a professional sport dietitian or clinical sport psychologist who specializes in disordered eating and exercise obsession to get the help that you need to ensure that you can continue to train and compete to your full potential.