Views: 14
– Excessive exercise in eating disorders: decoded psychological mechanisms. The results provide important implications for prevention and therapy.
Courtesy Instituto de Tecnologia Karlsruhe KIT: Excessive, sport and compulsive exercise is very harmful to health, especially in people suffering from eating disorders. Using electronic diaries, a research team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Freiburg have now discovered the everyday psychological mechanisms underlying this pathological sport.
The results suggest that people with eating disorders use sport to regulate depressing mood and negative thoughts related to eating disorders. The present study was published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (DOI: 10.1159 / 000504061).
It is indisputable that sport promotes health. However, if sport is excessive and compulsive and, in extreme cases, a “sport addiction”, it can make you sick.
This unhealthy sports activity is particularly pronounced in people who suffer from eating disorders. A research team from the KIT and Sport Sciences Institute (IfSS) and the University of Freiburg has now managed to discover the everyday psychological mechanisms underlying this pathological sport. The method that made this study possible is called outpatient assessment.
It records human experience and behavior in everyday life and was developed and used by a group of IfSS experts. “The main idea is that we need to examine the human species in their natural environment to understand human behavior,” says Professor Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, head of KIT’s Mental Health Laboratory.
In the present study, electronic diaries specifically triggered by activities developed were used on smartphones. “With these electronic diaries, we were able to investigate the dynamic interaction of physical activity and psychological variables in everyday life,” explains Markus Reichert, who does research in Professor Ebner-Priemer’s working group at KIT and together with Dr. Sabine Schlegel, from the University of Freiburg, is one of the study’s first two authors. “Thanks to this technology, it was possible to specifically request subjective reports in the case of visible episodes of movement and, thus, generate a high statistical variation in the data”.
Using this method, the physical activity of 29 patients with eating disorders and 35 healthy individuals was recorded objectively and continuously in their daily life for seven days, using an accelerometer, a motion sensor. The accelerometer was connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth, an installed application triggered daily consultations when certain activity limits were exceeded and reached and test participants were also asked to report their conditions before and after exercise.
The research team found that patients with eating disorders had a decline in mood before playing sports. This effect was not seen in healthy control subjects, before they felt particularly energetic before exercise. After exercise, patients with eating disorders were in a better mood compared to healthy individuals and in relation to average mood, they felt more relaxed, less pressure to be thin and more satisfied with the body. However, this effect lasted only a limited time, depending on the test person, from approximately one hour to three hours.
The results, published by the team of authors in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, suggest that patients with eating disorders use sport to regulate depressing mood and negative thoughts related to eating disorders.
“To deal with difficult emotional states and negative bodily experiences, they play sports, probably also due to the lack of alternative strategies at those times,” explains Markus Reichert. “It is also obvious that the positive effects of playing sports increase harmful sports activities – feeling released after playing sports leads to renewed sports activities when the effect wears off. This can lead to a vicious circle in which more and more sports are” mandatory ” “to feel good”, summarize Markus Reichert and Professor Almut Zeeck, Sudie coordinator at the Freiburg University Hospital.
According to Zeeck, these findings provide important implications for therapy and further research, the sport can be used in therapy in a targeted and dosed way, in order to positively influence the mood and body experience of people with eating disorders.
However, it is of central importance to teach patients alternative strategies to avoid unhealthy and excessive exercise. The latest technologies, such as daily smartphone intervention, can help here. “This opens up new perspectives for therapeutic interventions that patients can achieve in their daily lives and can be an important addition to outpatient psychotherapy,” says Zeeck.
Original Publication:
Markus Reichert, Sabine Schlegel, Friederike Jagau, Irina Timm, Lena Wieland, Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, Armin Hartmann and Almut Zeeck: mood and cognitive dysfunctions are antecedents and consequences of exercise within individuals and eating disorders. Physiotherapy and Psychosomatics. DOI: 10.1159 / 000504061.
Related article: Why people do endurance running?
Did you like the article? Subscribe to the newsletter !