 At what point has a young person's preoccupation with exercise gone too far? This is a difficult one because often we find that children and young people are really encouraged to exercise. It's great, it's one of those things that's an important part of healthy living, an important part of keeping ourselves well and it can be great fun as well. But when has it gone too far? Perhaps you've got a young person that you're working with and you're concerned, you think they're spending lots and lots of time exercising and you think there might be quite a preoccupation with shape, weight, and food perhaps there, perhaps this is verging on kind of eating disorder behaviour. So should you be worried? Now there are a few rules of thumb that can really really help here. Now the first one and this applies to any behaviour. So today we're talking about exercise but this could be the same for self harm or diet or other difficult behaviours or distressing behaviours. The first rule of thumb is if you took away this behaviour ignore it for a moment put it to one side. Would you be otherwise worried about that child? Would they still be a cause for concern for you? Are there other signs and symptoms that things aren't quite right here? Do they seem unhappy? Are they not doing as well as they used to in school? Are they withdrawing socially? Are they otherwise okay? If they're otherwise happy and healthy and fine then you probably don't have big cause for concern here. The next thing to think about is whether the exercise is controlling them or whether they are controlling the exercise if that makes sense. So are they in control of it? Is it controlling them? Is this something that has become an obsession, a compulsion or is this something they're doing because they enjoy it because it's fun? If their reasons are beginning to slip and they are no longer doing it because they enjoy it but rather because they feel they should or they must, if they can't take a time off from it then that becomes an issue. If this kid was going to go on holiday would one of the first things they thought about be how am I going to get my exercise in? Would be they be checking if they could access a gym or be taking their running shoes with them or whatever it might be? And again on some level this can be okay if it's something the kid really enjoys but if it's the very first thing they think about and they panic at the thought of not being able to do it then that's an issue. Could they take a day off from this without really freaking out? The next thing is around how the child kind of evaluates themselves based on how the exercise is going. If they are placing a very heavy kind of burden on the exercise related behavior as to how they evaluate themselves then that can be an issue. So if they feel that unless they complete a certain amount of exercise or lose a certain amount of weight or gain a certain amount of muscle tone that they are valueless, worthless, a failure, whatever it might be then again that's an issue. Again if they're doing it for fun or because they want to see improvements or be part of a team lots of these behaviors are perfectly valid and fine but if it's really having a sort of negative impact on their evaluation of self if they're not able to live up to their standards when it comes to their sport to their exercise then again that can be an issue. I think the thing we need to remember more than anything is that first one. Would you be otherwise concerned about this child? Now if you have a young person and you think that they're kind of you know they're not quite at the point where you're really really concerned about it but you can imagine it might become an issue then there are a couple of things that you can think about here too. One is that actually sport and exercise can be fantastic ways of relieving stress of enjoying ourselves so think about whether there are ways that that child that young person can access the sport that they're doing just for fun. Are they able to do this in a healthier more balanced way maybe to do it a bit less to do it with less high stakes and that kind of thing and the other thing is sometimes to stop measuring what they're doing so sometimes a young person can get kind of obsessed with calorie counting or step counting or timing reps or whatever it might be and again sometimes if you remove the recording of that then they're no longer able to compete with themselves and perhaps they'll do it just a bit more for fun for fun you know it's really important that we do things just for fun. The other thing here is that sometimes it can become like the single dimension on which the young person judges themselves and again we might hear be thinking about how we need our multiple pillars of self-esteem. Remember the temple will stand really well on multiple pillars but if you've just got one pillar of self-esteem and something happens to shake that then the whole thing comes tumbling down so we need our multiple pillars of self-esteem so if you feel that this young person is putting too much emphasis on this one part of their life then we need to have a think about what are the other things that make them special unique what are the other things they enjoy or that they could value about themselves and help them to explore some of those other things too. I hope this helps a little bit again if you have a gut feeling that things aren't quite right here open up a conversation with that child do some listening let them tell their story find out what's going on for them and keep an eye on them if you need to and return to it frequently if necessary. Good luck!