Gyms need to wake up to eating disorders

Going to the gym can be a chore, but once you’ve done an hour or so the thrill of having burned off 1000 calories and feeling toned and in good shape feels wonderful. But for an anorexic it’s dangerous.

Getting inside the mind of an anorexic is hard to describe, but the combination of an excercise machine – with its fancy buttons and programmes, its timer and its calories burned tool is a lethal cocktail in the hands of someone suffering from an eating disorder. But what gets my goat is the fact that here in the UK, stopping an anorexic person going to the gym is something they don’t do.

You see I recently joined up to a gym here in Norwich, England. ‘Health and Safety’ is a big thing, so they made me fill in a standard gym sign-up form, used by thousands of gyms across the UK. Name, address, age, telephone number etc – but when it came to medical conditions I was dumbfounded.

Have you had, or do you suffer from the following:

A heart condition? Y/N

Back problems? Y/N

Respiratory conditions ? Y/N

Epilepsy ? Y/N

Dizziness? Y/N

Obesity? Y/N

No – No – No – No

But where was the Eating Disorder? Y/N question? Not there. So basically all of the gyms across the UK are allowing people suffering from eating disorders to sign up, go to the gym, burn thousands of calories, without having to tell them of their condition. This shocked me, even moreso when I walked through to see a painfully thin girl on the stair machine. Her eyes was sunken, her ribcage and hips stuck out and her legs were like twigs – but there she was huffing and puffing away.

I wanted to go over to her and stop her from doing it. I wanted to shake her and make her see sense. But I couldn’t. She was going to do what she was going to do – the responsibility for stopping her should lie with the gym management. Yet as I have already said, there’s no Eating Disorder question on the sign-up!

If eating disorders are going to be beaten, gyms need to wake up to how dangerous they are. It works both ways though – I think McDonalds staff should be given the power to refuse to serve obese people…

But that’s another blog post.