That's the question raised by researcher Rony Duncan. In his "News and Views" piece for the
British Medical Journal, published this past September, Duncan argues that gyms do have some responsibility, and lays out three main areas in which this could be beneficial.
1) It provides a possibility for intervention.
2) It can help promote a healthy body image.
3) It can help break through the delusional thinking that accompanies EDs.
The possibility for intervention is well-intentioned and will probably fall on deaf ears. It would have for me. This isn't to say that people shouldn't speak up, just that speaking up will not necessarily produce a newly-converted couch potato. Frankly, if someone had spoken up to me, I would have just switched to a new gym. In fact, I was so paranoid about someone noticing that I took all sorts of steps to make sure I never exercise excessively in any one place at any one time. I spread my exercise sessions throughout the day and in several different locations: outside, my apartment, the gym at work, the gym at home. No one knew, of course, that I worked out several times each day.
The second point is almost laughable. First of all, Duncan is making the assumption that anyone who exercises excessively is visibly underweight. I rarely was. And many others aren't, either. Do we not have a problem until you can count our vertebrae? Secondly, preventing the visibly anorexic from exercising will probably not have a large impact on most people's body image, nor is that something that other people can control. Kicking someone out of a gym because they're very thin and giving other people a complex sounds more like playground logic.
There's also the problem that many men have exercise addictions, and also that someone can have a lower BMI (known as being constitutionally thin) and be perfectly healthy.
The third point is, perhaps, the most valuable. Writes Duncan:
...when gyms fail to intervene over members who are below a healthy body weight, they risk becoming complicit in the delusions held by these individuals, strengthening the perception that more exercise and weight loss are needed. My long experience with anorexia has left me peeved at any number of things, including the paucity of good treatments (and treatment providers!). One of my other peeves is that, other than my mom, no one really spoke up and told me I was exercising too much or losing too much weight. Would the truth have made a bit of difference? Probably not then. But it's very hard to convince yourself you have a problem when everyone else seems to be living in the same delusional world as you are.
If I were sick, I thought,
surely somebody would say something.
And because they didn't, it only reinforced the idea that I was fine.
I don't necessarily think that speaking up to an exercise addict about his/her gym habits will magically take off the blinders. I don't know that it will decrease his/her overall exercise. I don't know that it will improve others' body image. I don't even know that it will break through the wall of delusion and
anosognosia that comes along with eating disorders.
But there is value in speaking the truth, in saying what needs to be said whether the listener wants to hear it or is ready to hear it. I am incredibly angry that so few people said anything to me during my illness, when I ran to the bathroom after meals, when I basically moved into the gym, when I was using binder clips to keep my pants up. I was secretive, yes, but you would have had to be blind to miss some of this stuff.
Speaking up says one incredibly priceless thing to a sufferer: I care about you. And that is a message that sufferers need to hear, over and over and over again.
1) It provides a possibility for intervention.
2) It can help promote a healthy body image.
3) It can help break through the delusional thinking that accompanies EDs.
The possibility for intervention is well-intentioned and will probably fall on deaf ears. It would have for me. This isn't to say that people shouldn't speak up, just that speaking up will not necessarily produce a newly-converted couch potato. Frankly, if someone had spoken up to me, I would have just switched to a new gym. In fact, I was so paranoid about someone noticing that I took all sorts of steps to make sure I never exercise excessively in any one place at any one time. I spread my exercise sessions throughout the day and in several different locations: outside, my apartment, the gym at work, the gym at home. No one knew, of course, that I worked out several times each day.
The second point is almost laughable. First of all, Duncan is making the assumption that anyone who exercises excessively is visibly underweight. I rarely was. And many others aren't, either. Do we not have a problem until you can count our vertebrae? Secondly, preventing the visibly anorexic from exercising will probably not have a large impact on most people's body image, nor is that something that other people can control. Kicking someone out of a gym because they're very thin and giving other people a complex sounds more like playground logic.
There's also the problem that many men have exercise addictions, and also that someone can have a lower BMI (known as being constitutionally thin) and be perfectly healthy.
The third point is, perhaps, the most valuable. Writes Duncan:
...when gyms fail to intervene over members who are below a healthy body weight, they risk becoming complicit in the delusions held by these individuals, strengthening the perception that more exercise and weight loss are needed.
My long experience with anorexia has left me peeved at any number of things, including the paucity of good treatments (and treatment providers!). One of my other peeves is that, other than my mom, no one really spoke up and told me I was exercising too much or losing too much weight. Would the truth have made a bit of difference? Probably not then. But it's very hard to convince yourself you have a problem when everyone else seems to be living in the same delusional world as you are. If I were sick, I thought, surely somebody would say something.
And because they didn't, it only reinforced the idea that I was fine.
I don't necessarily think that speaking up to an exercise addict about his/her gym habits will magically take off the blinders. I don't know that it will decrease his/her overall exercise. I don't know that it will improve others' body image. I don't even know that it will break through the wall of delusion and anosognosia that comes along with eating disorders.
But there is value in speaking the truth, in saying what needs to be said whether the listener wants to hear it or is ready to hear it. I am incredibly angry that so few people said anything to me during my illness, when I ran to the bathroom after meals, when I basically moved into the gym, when I was using binder clips to keep my pants up. I was secretive, yes, but you would have had to be blind to miss some of this stuff.
Speaking up says one incredibly priceless thing to a sufferer: I care about you. And that is a message that sufferers need to hear, over and over and over again.