Exercise to Beat Anorexia - New Research Suggests Exercise Can Help Teen Girls With Eating Disorders
Eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia, are very serious psychiatric illnesses that mainly effect young women.
They can have disastrous effects on the lives of the young women affected and they families.
They are incredibly serious and can result in hospitalisation or even death.
BEAT in the UK estimates that 1.
5 million people in the UK have some form of eating disorder (undiagnosed or diagnosed).
A 2007 survey carried out in 2007 found that around one in five 16-24 year old women showed signs of a problem with food.
In the past exercise has been seen as a negative when dealing with anorexia or bulima sufferers.
Thos effected by the psychiatric disorder use it as a way to control their weight often becoming obsessed with doing more and more exercise.
New research by the Universities of Kentucky and Arizona seems to go against the grain when it suggests that exercise can actually be beneficial when working to treat and prevent eating disorders.
The study surveyed 539 normal-weight college students most of whom were not at risk from the illnesses.
They evaluated the students' drive to be thin, along with their exercise habits and risk for exercise dependence and used statistical models to find potential relationships.
They found that, more than its physical benefits, the psychological effects of exercise could help prevent and treat the condition.
This report has important implications.
It helps us to further understand the complex relationship between eating pathology, exercise behaviour and the way exercise makes us feel.
If exercise can have a positive effect on stable eating disorder sufferers this could have major implications for their treatment as well as helping to decrease the cost to health service providers.
It is early days for this very new evidence.
As a next step the researchers would like to launch another study that would follow at-risk individuals over a period of several months to see if exercise impacts their symptoms.
Read more about the report here: research
They can have disastrous effects on the lives of the young women affected and they families.
They are incredibly serious and can result in hospitalisation or even death.
BEAT in the UK estimates that 1.
5 million people in the UK have some form of eating disorder (undiagnosed or diagnosed).
A 2007 survey carried out in 2007 found that around one in five 16-24 year old women showed signs of a problem with food.
In the past exercise has been seen as a negative when dealing with anorexia or bulima sufferers.
Thos effected by the psychiatric disorder use it as a way to control their weight often becoming obsessed with doing more and more exercise.
New research by the Universities of Kentucky and Arizona seems to go against the grain when it suggests that exercise can actually be beneficial when working to treat and prevent eating disorders.
The study surveyed 539 normal-weight college students most of whom were not at risk from the illnesses.
They evaluated the students' drive to be thin, along with their exercise habits and risk for exercise dependence and used statistical models to find potential relationships.
They found that, more than its physical benefits, the psychological effects of exercise could help prevent and treat the condition.
This report has important implications.
It helps us to further understand the complex relationship between eating pathology, exercise behaviour and the way exercise makes us feel.
If exercise can have a positive effect on stable eating disorder sufferers this could have major implications for their treatment as well as helping to decrease the cost to health service providers.
It is early days for this very new evidence.
As a next step the researchers would like to launch another study that would follow at-risk individuals over a period of several months to see if exercise impacts their symptoms.
Read more about the report here: research
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