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Tom Tomorrow: America -- land of secret irrationality!

CONFESSIONS OF A STAIR MISTRESS | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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You wouldn't think so, but there were others like me. I saw them everywhere actually, each of us so desperately isolated in our lonely, seemingly shallow pursuits. We eyed each other suspiciously, but never said a word. I could pick another out a mile away. She arrives at the gym too early and stays too late. (Although invariably there were men like me, I only noticed the women.) There's a look in her eye: both glazed and frantic. She's the one in the back of the aerobics class who, during the cool-down, frenetically jogs in place while everyone else stretches languorously. She will not get off that bike (that treadmill, that track, that rower) until she has hit the desired time. 28:35 is not good enough, ever. 28:35 is failure. 30:00 is completion, no excuses. She comes to the dining hall looking like hell -- stringy-haired, wild-eyed and clammy. She lies about her hours at the gym and ignores the mounting injuries.

There's a name for this portrait of excess: compulsive exercise, or exercise addiction. And like the dynamic duo of eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia, it also tends to flourish among college students. They start out with positive, healthy intentions, says Richard Kadison, M.D., chief of mental health services at Harvard University Health Services, "but when it goes bad, it goes really bad. I have treated students who won't travel because it may interfere with their exercise, or who, after eating one too many bites of a meal, will go out on that 11-mile run, on ice-coated roads, at any time, day or night. An addict becomes powerless to their compulsion and is impaired by it."

"It's a control thing," says Michael Sachs, professor in the department of physical education at Temple University and a specialist in exercise and sports psychology. "What starts for health and fitness purposes ultimately flips around and begins to control you. You can't imagine not exercising every day, and when you don't, you feel terrible, both physically and psychologically." Richard Benyo, author of "The Exercise Fix" (Human Kinetics, 1990), agrees: "The exercise addict simply has to exercise. Over time, they've simply turned a positive thing negative."

And because exercise is usually such a healthy endeavor, addicts generally receive praise for their efforts, notes Laura Kaminker, author of "Exercise Addiction: When Fitness Becomes an Obsession" (Rosen Publishing, 1998), and this too helps keep the true dysfunction of their daily lives under wraps. Most exercise addicts know (intellectually, at least) when they have gone too far, says Kadison, and they work very hard to hide the truth about their habits. This secrecy is another characteristic that compulsive exercisers share with those afflicted by eating disorders.

In fact, in Kaminker's research, almost all exercise addicts exhibit some signs of disordered eating, whether it is a binge-purge cycle, generalized food-preoccupation or overly stringent eating habits. Although eating disorders generally affect more women than men, "exercise addiction is an equal opportunity condition," says Sachs, "but men are generally able to disguise it better." For the bulimic, exercise is a "cleaner" purging technique than the trilogy of old standbys: vomiting, laxatives and diuretics. For the anorexic, it is one more way to eliminate unwanted calories, one step closer to the see-through wonder of Ally McBeal. For a confused, angry and grieving person such as me, it was a way to express my problems corporeally, to literally attempt to outrun them.

And it seems like almost every student I talk to, from freshman to doctoral candidate, has a story of when and why they too crossed the line, or of how their roommate or best friend took a good thing too far.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. "God, if she needs to lose weight, then I really do."