Can Women Exercise Too Much

Sure they are. There’s something called the female athlete triad, and triad of course means three things, so women that over-exercise and have problems with their eating, they may have a frank eating disorder like anorexia, or they may just be restricting what they’re eating and then have problems with losing their regular cycle, their regular estrogen production of their body, and then they can end up with bone loss, osteoporosis, almost like a woman who is post-menopausal.

So we do think that exercise is incredibly beneficial to young women. It's shown that if you exercise you are more likely to graduate high school if you are on a team, for instance, but if you overdo it, it’s really a crucial thing that can cause negative health problems.

I think that recently the data shows us that it’s really the energy balance that’s the biggest issue. So if you’re expending a lot of energy, you need to be taking in that many calories, and if you end up in a negative where you’re expending more than you’re eating, that’s when you start to have this problem with the female athlete triad.