Eating Disorders In Dancers

1070 Words5 Pages
Eating Disorders in Dancers Over-working, excessive dieting, obsessive healthiness, starving, and consistent vomiting: these and more may consume the life of a dancer. Dancers are taught from the first day that they step onto the dance floor about the importance of being healthy. Maybe their parent simply teaches them about healthy food choices and watching their weight. Maybe the dance teacher tells certain students to lose a few pounds to maintain a proper body for dancing. No matter how the parent or dance teacher says it, the idea of being skinny, fit, and lean is engrained into a dancer’s mind from day one. These ideas of being the skinniest and prettiest are already being put into small children’s brains through our society. We have flawless models plastered on every billboard, magazine cover, and television channel in the world. Even this pressure to be perfect can be detrimental to a child as one grows and the mind is implanted with these concepts. Is this pressure denser in the world of a dancer? Yes, it is. Being a dancer causes a greater susceptibility to developing an eating disorder due to the prominent talk of what makes a “perfect dancer.” To understand more about eating disorders in dancers, one must first understand the many different types of eating disorders. The two most harmful eating disorders are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is basically an obsessive fear of gaining weight. It is when a person has a loss of appetite and a distorted image of him/herself and body. When a noticeable weight loss happens in an abnormally short amount of time, it is commonly linked to this disorder. Bulimia nervosa is when a person does an act called “binging and purging.” In this case, the victim of this disorder tends to over-eat, but when this person is done, he or she forces the food out of the body. Normally, this is done, because
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