Image Credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage.comHere's a day in the life of Heidi Montag: lift weights, run, repeat. For the past two months, the reality star has been exercising from 5 in the morning to 7 at night. "I've been working out really hard because I had this pool party and I was like, 'I have to be in shape,'" she told US Weekly.
But a 14 hour daily workout? It shouldn't really be a surprise, considering her compulsive decision to have a record 10 plastic surgery operations in one day to resculpt her face and body in 2009. She even had her back scooped.
Now she's dropped from 130 to 103 pounds by running and weightlifting, turning several of those pounds into rippling abdomen muscle. If she wants to land the cover of a fitness magazine, she's got it in the bag. (And the Montag-Pratts like their magazine covers). But is that kind of extreme exercise as dangerous as getting extreme plastic surgeries?
"If you're working out 14 hours a day, something is going to blow," Dr. Sharon Chirban, a Harvard psychologist, who hasn't treated Montag, tells CBS News. "Most of the compulsive exercisers I've worked with end up with an injury, and then everything falls apart because they can't exercise."
For women, over exercising is particularly problematic. It can create a hormone imbalance halting menstruation and making bones brittle. There's also a condition called "staleness" where the positive effects of exercise turn into depression and fatigue, according to Dr. Pauline Powers, author of The Exercise Balance about exercise compulsion.
The desire to take control of your body and process what you ate obsessively through workouts can also be symptomatic of an eating disorder like, bulimia or anorexia. Like most addictions the warning signs are clear: if exercising interferes with your life, if you can't go a day without it, and if you find yourself exercising through injury or illness, it's a real problem.
Montag's 14-hour-ritual is a long way from the 30 minutes a day the Mayo Clinic recommends for aerobic exercise, but there's no set limit for what the body can do. For instance, the Tour De France bikers can put in 14 hour days and exhibit perfect, even stellar, health, according to a new study. But trained athletes aren't carrying a radically reformed figure like Montag.
It's taken her a year just to be able to work out, much less eat a burger, without being in pain. Now she's found a new way to push her body. Abs that come from sit-ups are better than abs that come from implants-at least it's real muscle tissue and not another artificial substance added to the layers in her body. But why hasn't she learned from the surgery(and the backlash) that too much of one thing is just too much? She may not learn from her mistakes, but we do.
Related:
Montag tries to explain why she went under the knife
Montag sets off plastic surgery backlash
Heidi Montag's extreme plastic surgery
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