Actionable tips for a healthy and balanced approach to eating on the holidays. Consider these 5 tips to not only build confidence around your dinner table but to also find more freedom and enjoyment throughout the season.
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Dealing With Diet Talk- Your Ultimate Guide
Since we cannot control or prevent all instances of criticism, it helps to equip yourself with the tools to educate and set boundaries as needed. But how? The first step is to decide if it’s worth the energy to educate others about your lifestyle decisions.
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Raise A Healthy Dancer
As a dance parent, your role in fundamental to the success of your dancer’s career. This article provides first-hand experience and 5 key strategies to consider to support your dancer’s passion.
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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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Get Started With Gentle Nutrition
From pre-performance snacks to post-performance recovery, nutrition education is essential to a dancer’s training. But as I’ve discussed previously, dancers must juggle aspects of performance nutrition and meal planning, both of which can hover the realms of diet culture, with the goal of avoiding restrictive eating habits. To balance the importance of performance nutrition with the fundamentals of a non-diet lifestyle, we must recognize the tenth principle of intuitive eating: “gentle nutrition.”
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How To Create A Healthy Relationship with Food
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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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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Dancer Burnout – How To Heal
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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7 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 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+ New Year’s Resolutions for Dancers
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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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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Diet Culture in The Dance Industry
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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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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Tiny Pretty Things – A Review
With the pilot laying the groundwork for the most common dancer stereotypes, I had some concerns. But then I kept watching… and realized something big
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5 Actionable Tips to Build a Better Body Image, By Catherine Drury
To consistently dance and perform at your best, you need to have a working relationship with your body. Asking someone to love their body is often unrealistic (though it can be a goal!). However, a certain level of body acceptance is necessary to achieve the physical- and artistic- success required of dancers. Though it takes time, let’s discuss 5 tips to build a better body image:
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Reclaiming My Ballet Body, By Colleen M. Werner
Featured writer Colleen Werner explains how her journey to food- and body- healing shaped her #BoPoBallerina movement.
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