Every health expert will tell you that it is important to eat healthy foods, watch how much you eat, and to exercise regularly. 

For some people this advice is taken so literally they border on the obsessive end of trying to get healthy.

These people have a wide range of disorders and their fixation on fitness causes a decline in health.

Kaelin Young, an associate professor in the department of human performance studies, said a healthy lifestyle requires a balance.

“It’s matching your energy intake with your energy needs, and the common individual has no idea how much energy they need,” Young said.

Usually this leads to people gaining weight, but for those who have become obsessed with being healthy it can lead to the problem of losing too much weight.

This can lead to issues ranging from loss of fat and muscle tissue, metabolic rate decreasing, and the loss of a menstrual cycle for women.

But, it isn’t just about watching how much you eat but also how much you exercise.

“We have to put it into perspective,” Young said. “You have athletes who exercise two to four hours everyday. So you take a common individual who does the same thing, it’s only detrimental of what their physical state is.”

Young said that in the personal training field this is called overtraining and leads to multiple problems.

Over exercising can cause hormone problems, higher propensity to injury, and loss of strength due to severe fatigue and injury.

Young recommends preventing this from happening by monitoring caloric intake, getting proper nutrition, and allowing time for rest so your muscles can recover.

The amount of time needed for recovery varies based on the length of workout and your own personal fitness level.

It is also important that you focus on keeping yourself hydrated to avoid dehydration. Dehydrating is one of the fastest ways to lose weight, but also one of the most dangerous.

If you are trying to lose weight, Young cautioned that healthy weight loss is no more than two pounds a week.

In the end what matters is not how much weight you lose, but how healthy you feel. If your fitness routine is based around how quickly you can lose weight you risk losing more than your waistline.