As summer progresses, please beware: It is possible to not only eat too healthy, but also to exercise too much.

The former is a disorder known as orthorexia nervosa. As Mary Watson Capron wrote last semester in The Signpost , the student newspaper at Weber State University, “Orthorexia is the fixation on righteous eating and an unhealthy obsession with eating only healthy foods. Like anorexia and bulimia, it can wreak serious damage on the health of someone trapped in the obsession.”

The Daily Camera at the University of Colorado Boulder reported that one young woman with the affliction several years ago died after she “basically starved herself to extinction.”

According to an April feature in The Arches at Milwaukee’s Mount Mary College, symptoms of orthorexia include spending more than three hours each day thinking about your diet, planning meals a week in advance, focusing on the nutritional value of a meal over “the pleasure of eating it,” socially isolating yourself so you won’t be forced into eating things you don’t want while out with friends and family and feeling guilty whenever you don’t live up to your extreme dietary standards.

“Many orthorexics deny themselves meats, fats and other foods that are good for the body when eaten in moderation,” Arches staffer Danielle Goetz writes. “Unlike a sound vegetarian diet, they don’t make up for the protein and amino acids meat provides.”

Meanwhile, a separate report in The Daily Titan at California State University, Fullerton, focuses on a somewhat related activity: over-exercising. As Sarah Fernandez confirms , “[I]f you start to put other important priorities on the back burner in order to watch that Jillian Michaels workout DVD or go to the gym for hours and hours every single day of the week, then you might be working out a little too much. When you have other obligations at home or school and then you begin to cut all of that out of your schedule just to work out, then it can be considered an obsession.”

As you might imagine, the all-things-in-moderation MO wins out among the experts cited by Fernandez. “Too much of anything can be bad for the body,” she begins the write-up. ”Too much food can make you sick, if you drink too much water it can make you drown, literally, and too much exercise can be unhealthy.”

Or as the Camera sarcastically chides readers, “That’s right, all you scrupulously healthy people — you are sick, sick, sick!”

A staff editorial published last semester in The Daily Free Press at Boston University argues more seriously, “Disorders concerning health, food and exercise — whether it be a binge or a purge or any or all — are extremely concerning, especially in a country like ours where everyone is completely overwhelmed by social pressure to be thin and by a media that is oversaturated with celebrities who serve as ‘thinspiration.’ . . . One solution is keeping balance, not restricting or avoiding in excess. Instead, practicing moderation over starvation is healthiest.”

What do you think? Do students at your school suffer from either orthorexia or over-exercise? And what do pre-med and exercise and sports science professors say are the healthiest eating, running and lifting regimes for the teen and 20-something set?

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