"Look at these rolls!"
"I need to lose weight!"
"I'm not gonna eat anything for the next week."
"I look so fat in this costume!"
How many times have you heard someone on your team say these phrases or something similar? How many times have you yourself uttered them? If you've answered "once or more" to my two questions, that's one or more times too many.
February 20-27 is Eating Disorders Awareness Week, a time to promote awareness and prevention of eating disorders. As dancers, this is especially important, since performers including dancers, figure skaters, gymnasts, and divers have, as a whole, such high incidences of eating disorders.
Why? There's a wonderful, informative article on the Something's Fishy eating disorder website that explores reasons why anorexia (in which sufferers restrict their food intake) and bulimia (in which sufferers purge the food they eat by self-induced vomiting, laxatives, diuretics, and diet pills) are common in ballet dancers. Click here to visit the page. The Something's Fishy site is an excellent resource for eating disorders in general, and it also contains links to eating disorder support groups and associations.
The article notes that one cause of eating disorders in dancers is the emphasis on appearance and weight in the dance world. Some teachers, directors, and producers have strict policies on weight - and often an unrealistic and unhealthy one. Negative comments on body size also fuel self-consciousness in the dancer, and some resort to disordered eating to "fix" the "weight problem."
But this is not the solution. Eating disorders are DEADLY, and restricting, bingeing, purging, and overexercising (just to name a few eating disordered behaviors) will not make you a better dancer. Dying to Dance by Sondra Forsyth, an article on the DanceArt.com site, goes into detail about the negative physical effects of an eating disorder on a dancer's body.
Eating disorders are not restricted to the professional realm of dance. Drill team members are dancers as well, and the performance stresses are just as great. The Drill Team Directors Association INSIGHTS magazine featured an article by a drill team director who has dealt with a team member's eating disorder. The story, Eating Disorder's . . . What You Don't Know Can Hurt is written by Annette Stark
INSIGHTS also features and article by Deborah J. Nelson that offers some excellent tips for making sure that the drill team experience does not encourage poor self-image. Flattering the dance.... go figure! discusses how to select costumes that will help place less emphasis on team members' body build and more on dancing.
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