Nutrition

Meal Prep for Dancers: A Practical Guide

Meal prep involves setting aside time to prepare meals and snacks for the upcoming week, ensuring that you have nourishing options ready to go. While many dancers understand the importance of meal planning for health and performance. In this article, discover practical meal prep strategies for dancers to heal their relationship with food. Learn how to save time, reduce stress, and nourish your body with balanced meals and snacks tailored to your busy lifestyle.

The Importance of Satisfaction with Food

Satisfaction is what I call the fourth macronutrient of a balanced plate. It’s that essential piece ensuring you fuel and nourish your body in a way that supports your relationship with food. For most, however, it’s often overlooked. This blog post dives into why satisfaction matters, how it plays a role in your performance, and how you can identify more satisfying options at meals.

Home For The Holidays: Strategies For Dancers

While going home for the holidays is normal for busy dancers, it often presents challenges. The key lies in creating routine while making room for flexibility— much of what we master in The Healthy Dancer®— without the stress of extremes or obsessing over food and movement. In this blog post, we’ll discuss strategies for dancers looking to maintain supportive eating and movement habits while at home for the Holidays.

Meal Planning for Dancers

Meal planning involves setting time aside to plan your day’s or week’s meals and snacks. In this guide, we’ll break down how to effectively meal plan for your schedule, focusing on the key nutrients dancers need, how to create balanced meals, and tips to maximize your meal plan efficiency.

Food Journaling for Dancers

A large part of learning how to eat intuitively involves raising body self-awareness. Learning how to eat intuitively also teaches us about the importance of compassionate self-care.

Dancers & Food Obsession

What is food obsession? There’s a fine line between promoting healthy habits and teetering with restrictive ones. This is especially true since diet culture masks disordered eating with “wellness.” Since food is both a necessity in life and a tool for optimizing a dancer’s performance, it can be easy for harmless habits to turn into obsessive behaviors.

The Truth About Food Addiction

Mental Health, Nutrition

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 unraveling food addiction.

Halloween Candy: A Guide for Dancers

Do you feel like you cannot trust yourself with Halloween candy? Perhaps you feel out of control this time of year. Halloween can be an opportunity to try intuitive eating and build a supportive relationship with candy (yep… that’s a thing!)

Portion Control: A Dancer’s Ultimate Guide

Learn how to dictate your portions using mindful eating techniques that help to increase your attunement to feeling fullness and satisfaction. Here are a few tips to consider.

A Dancer’s Guide to Healthy Snack Bars

With little time to build a balanced snack during performance season, convenience is crucial. A granola bar can be a quick and portable option to help fuel long rehearsals, auditions, or training days. If purchased ahead, they’re also readily available when hunger strikes unexpectedly. This article will dive into what dancers can consider when choosing a snack bar.

Is Clean Eating Healthy?

Clean eating suggests an idea of purity in food choices, often promoting the elimination of processed foods and a strict emphasis on whole, unrefined ingredients. While on the surface, this may seem like a good thing, especially for dancers who rely on proper nutrition to fuel their bodies, the truth is that the concept of clean eating can be harmful and even detrimental to a dancer’s performance, mental health, and long-term relationship with food.

Dancers, Food, and The Urge to Diet

Restricting the amount and types of food eaten can lead to energy deficiency— a direct marker of reduced stamina, strength, and focus. In this blog post, we’ll explore a handful of affirmations and reminders to help you move through instances when you feel the urge to restrict your food.

What Is Taste Hunger?

We’ve all had moments when we need to eat, but not because we’re physically hungry—it’s because something simply *sounds* or *tastes* good. Taste hunger occurs when you desire the flavor or experience of eating without needing to eat for physical reasons. In this blog post, we’ll break down what taste hunger is, why it happens, and how to navigate it supportively.

Why Dancers Need A Licensed Nutrition Expert

Dancers are especially vulnerable to the development of disordered eating and eating disorders. It’s essential that they seek qualified advice for appropriate nutrition intervention and prevention. With an abundance of information flooding our media feeds, it’s difficult to decipher truth from trends in regards to dance nutrition, dancer health, and dancer wellness. Dancers are not just artists, they’re also athletes. Therefore, trusting credentialed professionals, such as Registered Dietitian Nutritionists, helps to maximize a dancer’s strength and endurance in a way that promotes sustainable habits without the risk for injury and burnout.

A Dancer’s Diet: Fiber

From digestive regularity and immunity to satiety and sustained energy, fiber is surely a buzz-worthy topic worth learning about. And between busy schedules and constant physical exertion, dancers need fiber to regulate energy levels, maintain satiation, and encourage a moving digestive system. Since fiber is an essential component of a dancer’s diet, let’s discuss why and how you can assure that your fiber needs are met.

Injury Recovery Nutrition for Dancers

Injury is an inevitable part of a dancer’s journey. Although dancers often face a great deal of distress— physical, mental, and emotional— when recovering, an optimal recovery plan isn’t linear. What you eat can significantly influence how quickly and effectively you heal. Nutrition plays a pivotal role in each stage of recovery, from reducing inflammation to rebuilding tissue strength. In this blog post, we’ll uncover how to optimize your meal plan for injury recovery, helping you return to the studio stronger and more resilient.

Stress Less When Returning to The Studio

Taking time off from dancing—whether due to injury, vacation, or a break from the demanding routine—can be both a relief and a challenge. Returning to the studio often brings excitement, but it can also come with stress. Worrying about lost progress, changes in your body, or simply the pressure to pick up where you left off is common. You might turn to behaviors like calorie counting and weight tracking to “get back into shape.” To ease the transition, here are strategies to implement.

Stop Avoiding “Empty Calories”

For dancers, the desire to fuel for performance can make eating “empty calories” seem counterintuitive. As artistic athletes, dancers optimize their plates for adequate energy and muscle recovery. But when a dancer begins to stress about food, feeling anxious when those nutrient-dense options are unavailable, intentions to eat “healthfully” turn into unhealthy obsessions. While nutrient-dense foods are helpful, it’s equally important for dancers to make room for all foods, even those deemed less nourishing.

Healthy Snacking Guide for Dancers

I encourage dancers to optimize each eating opportunity as a chance to fuel for performance, however, many still hesitate to snack. Combatting this means building a smart snack plan; one that maintains optimal energy throughout long rehearsals and performances. Here’s a comprehensive guide on what dancers need to know about it.

A Dancer’s Metabolism: Here’s What You Should Know

If you’re wondering about your metabolism and how it works, then chances are you have questions about your body weight, shape, or size. Perhaps you’re comparing your body to another dancer’s and thinking, “Wow, they can eat whatever they want! I’d gain so much weight if I ate like that!” To answer this question and more, here’s an in-depth look into the intricacies of a dancer’s metabolism, how it influences their energy, and strategies for optimizing it.