Incorporating Exercise in the Treatment of Eating Disorders
Well the jet lag from my flight home from San Francisco has finally resided and once again "I Feel Great!" It occurred to me that some of you may be interested in the topic and some details of the paper I presented at the American Psychological Association (APA) conference. As I wrote in an earlier post, the title of the paper was Incorporating Exercise in the Treatment of Eating Disorders.
To summarize, we looked at a group of females in an in-patient facility that were suffering from a variety of eating disorders. We wanted to see if exercise would positively affect their body image upon release; in addition, we looked at how exercise affected their level of depression and eating disorder pathology. The results we found were pretty supportive of utilizing exercise during treatment; body image improved but not significantly over the control group, depression scores dropped significantly as did the eating disorder pathology over the control group. Although exercise during treatment of eating disorders is still somewhat controversial, this study shows that exercise in a controlled environment can be healthy. As always, doing anything to an excess is not good for you...even exercise.
If you have any questions at all about your exercise habits, please feel free to contact me via a comment, personal email, or telephone call.
I looked over the study summary. My one question is:
Do you and/or the other researchers plan to follow-up with the participants and control group?
I think it would be interesting to see if the benefits of exercise (the lowered depression and eating disorder pathologies) will be maintained (or not) after 6 months to a few years after in-patient treatment.
Reply to this
EXCELLENT QUESTION!!! One in which I wish I had the right answer to, which would be YES. Unfortunately this study was performed at the Philadelphia area Renfrew Center and they don't do any follow up.
I was so disappointed when I found that out. My contention is that even though both groups' body image scores improved upon exit, that the exercise group's scores would maintain at a higher level 6 months post release. I also feel the scores on the depression scale and eating disorders inventory would also stay significantly higher.
Thanks for the question!
What are your thoughts?
Reply to this