Dancers, especially ballet dancers, have to be strong, flexible and (typically, for the aesthetic norms of the form) lean. Extra weight also provides added stress on joints (especially during jumps and on pointe) and can impede partnered lifts.
For many dancers, particular during adolescent body changes due to hormones, this need to have low body fat can cause some emotional and psychological stress. Very few of the dancers I grew up with were able to create and maintain the necessary dance physiques without careful attention to their diets, for nutrition, performance and for the reasons mentioned above.
This explains a bit, even if it does not justify, the kinds of diets one typically sees in the danceworld. Below is my top-10 list of the most unreasonable ones I came across while growing up [warning: these are all harmful and ill-advised for health reasons]:
- Eat only ___ [fill in the blank with one food or drink] diets. The ones I saw were bee pollen, bananas, Sugarfree Jello, coffee, Tab (back in the day).
- Smoke cigarettes.
- Take diet pills (usually a kind of amphetamine).
- Use laxatives (billed as a way to “detoxify”).
- Wear rubber pants (yes, rubber) or “sweat it out” in a sauna or steam room.
- Fast (800 calories or fewer) for 5 days/week and eat anything you want for 2 days.
- Add running, swimming, or jumping jacks to your dance training.
- Take bites of and chew food and then spit it out before swallowing.
- Vomit after eating.
- Don’t ever sit down during the day — keep moving or at least standing.
The worst thing that the unreasonable diets did (besides not working except temporarily) was to put you out of touch with what your body actually needed to sustain the training we were engaged in. For me it also created a “me against my body” attitude where instead of working in harmony with my body I was at constant war with it (see, treating my body as an “it” rather than part of my “I”). This attitude contributed to a kind of self-hatred as well as set me up for further weaknesses and injuries.
I am far from my ideal ballerina weight now, I might add, but I am far healthier in mind and spirit. Contrary to the popular adage “nothing tastes as good as thin feels” when I was thin I was often not feeling good at all but sick, fatigued, exceedingly hungry, and (still) self-hating for not being able to achieve the right body look without all of these side effects.