Dancers can create a healthy relationship with food by using this 5-step guide. As a dancer, your relationship with food plays a key role in the sustainability of your career. Learn how to ditch the dieting mentality, give yourself unconditional permission around food, use food neutrality, practice food flexibility, and integrate mindful eating.
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Dancers and Body Neutrality
Dancers at all levels struggle with poor body image and/or body dysmorphia, which further leads to disordered eating and/or eating disorders. With the #balletbodiesunite movement making waves throughout our industry, dancers worldwide are speaking out against unrealistic body ideals. But how can dancers truly overcome the desire to fit such an unrealistic mold when the industry continues to exemplify instances of body criticism?
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Body Image Support for Dancers
Body image is created starting at a young age and often reflects internalized messaging, which sets the stage for the development of either a positive or negative body image. Dancers at all levels struggle with poor body image and/or body dysmorphia, which further leads to disordered eating and/or eating disorders. This is a direct result of antiquated body ideals that unfortunately saturate the industry.
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Dancers & Disordered Eating
Has your interest in healthy eating become more of an obsession? Dancers are at risk to perfectionism, which can drive rates of disordered eating and eating disorders. Orthorexia describes the unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. Learn more about orthorexia and disordered eating among dancers.
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How to Handle Rejection at Your Dance Audition
How can dancers navigate audition disappointment and rejection? With diet culture especially prominent in the dance industry, the urge for dancers to regain any semblance of control often translates into unsustainable behaviors like restricting food intake or partaking in excessive cross-training routines. But using food as a tool for self-control, rather than self-care, quickly backfires as restrictive dieting leads to exhaustion, burnout, and even injury.
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Dancers and Overeating
Whether you call it “overeating” or “binge eating,” you may be familiar with the experience of eating to the point of physical discomfort. Eating past fullness can result from a variety of reasons, and before we discuss how to stop “overeating,” we should first identify why you’re “overeating.”
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Dancers and Emotional Eating
Society often views emotional eating negatively. A healthy relationship with food means that we honor personal preferences that often stem from emotionally pleasant memories and experiences.
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Dealing With Dancer Burnout
Dancers can feel burn out from a high-pressured environment that is unfortunately coupled with impossible food and body beliefs. In this instance, a dancer’s relationship with movement feels less joyous and more punitive. Learn more about how to prevent dancer burnout.
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6 Myths About Intuitive Eating
I’ve previously discussed what intuitive eating is and how dancers can implement these principles into their active lifestyles. In this article, we’re debunking the six most common myths associated with intuitive eating, including how those with chronic illness can still benefit from a non-restrictive approach
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25+ Sustainable Non-Diet New Year’s Resolutions
We know that diets don’t work within a year of starting and that weight cycling comes with countless negative health implications. In this article, I’m sharing my favorite non-diet resolutions to start your New Year in a way that supports YOU. The goal is to feel confident in your body, competent with your food choices, and supported mentally, physically, and emotionally.
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Ideal Height Weight Chart for Dancers
Using a charting system such as ideal weight charts to determine a dancer’s performance potential is extremely harmful. Dancers have a three times higher risk of suffering from an eating disorder when compared to the general population. This article discusses what an Ideal Weight Chart for Dancers is and whether they’re helpful or harmful.
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Food Neutrality & How To Heal From Diet Culture
Food neutrality doesn’t disregard the nutritional value of food. Food neutrality enables us to make choices based upon our whole being, including the mental, emotional, social, and physical elements of our “health” and “wellness.” Use food to honor all facets of life, including your nostalgic memories, new experiences, pleasures, joys, comforts, and so forth.
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What Is Food Flexibility & Why Do Dancers Need It?
Dancers require flexibility both in the studio and out. Heal your relationship with food using Food Flexibility. The more flexible you are in your food choices, the more willing you are to move through life’s vast experiences with agility and ease.
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Reduce The Risk of Disordered Eating & Eating Disorders In Your Studio
Dance educators are on the frontline: from cultivating an environment that supports the longevity of a dancer’s career to identifying challenges that occur inside the studio. Dance educators have the upper hand in helping to reduce rates of disordered eating, eating disorders, and body image challenges in the industry. This article will break down 5 specific strategies that dance educators can implement to cultivate a healthier environment in their studios.
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What Is Diet Culture?
Diet culture is a system of beliefs that idolizes weight loss. In diet culture, it’s believed that thinness equates to health, and in this pursuit of thinness (or “health,”) certain foods are either demonized or glorified. Diet culture also imposes moral value upon our food choices and as a result, we’re “good” for eating “healthy” and we’re “bad” for eating “unhealthy.” Removing the weight diet culture can help dancers flourish in physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
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Starting A Journal- A Guide for Dancers
Do dancers benefit from journaling? When it comes to food, is it possible to keep a journal without turning to obsessive behaviors like calorie counting and macro tracking? In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of journaling. We’ll also decipher between food journaling and meal tracking and how dancers can utilize a journal in a helpful (and even intuitive) way.
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Mindful Eating For Dancers
When you begin to utilize the tool of mindful eating, you add back a major nutrient to your balanced plate: experience. From that experience, whether it is positive, negative, or neutral, blooms a unique learning opportunity that allows you to move forward with building trust with your body’s intrinsic cues of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction.
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How Can Dancers Set Boundaries?
Setting boundaries is incredibly important for guarding ourselves against diet culture and for living a life of food freedom. When stuck in the trenches of diet culture, boundaries go out the window. Our needs and our opinions around food become dependent upon an unattainable goal (like a “perfect” diet or an “ideal” body type). We’re made to believe that our self-worth is defined by the foods we eat and by the size of our body.
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How Can Food Impact My Mood?
The potential association between disordered eating and certain mood states like depression, fatigue, and confusion has been examined among dancers. Especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mental health of the American youth is worsening, and the need for treatment surpasses what is available. But while the complexities of mental health span beyond this article, there is a large body of research examining the impact of what we eat on our moods.
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The Truth About Food Addiction
Do you feel like you’re always thinking about your next meal? Do thoughts about what you “should” and “shouldn’t” eat play on repeat in your mind? Or, perhaps, it’s your fear of “once I start I’ll never stop!” In this article, we’re not just debunking the MYTH, yes, MYTH of food addiction, but we’re also diving into what it actually means to be obsessed with food, why food obsession happens, and how to FINALLY stop these obsessive thoughts.
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