My Support Forums - View Single Post - Bipolar check-in #71

*Beth* · 05:36 PM

That is wonderful, about your mom @Moose72. Have you ever danced?

Good for her for not encouraging her students to starve themselves. There has become a tremendous awareness, over the past 25-ish years in the ballet world, to put a stop to creating eating disorders among ballerinas. That awareness came in great part because of a compelling autobiography titled Dancing on My Grave by Gelsey Kirkland. George Balanchine forced his dancers into eating disorders or they were out. Period. The book is just fascinating.

The first 2 ballet teachers I had in the 70's (when women were already encouraged to be unnaturally thin, and so many women lived on diet pills) wanted their students to be as thin and light as thin 12 year old girls. They harped on it constantly. I was "lucky," because I had a thin build already, so going from 110 down to 102 was easy. Fortunately, I wasn't particularly interested in food and I wasn't inclined toward an eating disorder, or I could have dropped down to a dangerously low weight. But I was too tall to be a serious ballerina anyway, so dance for me was just a wonderful, healthy hobby.

I had friends in my dance classes, though, who tortured themselves over the weight crap. It was pitiful. They were obsessed with losing weight and it was obvious that their bodies were not structured that way. The dance teachers... looking back, I'm angry at those women, really disgusted by them.