TW: mentions eating disorders and body dysmorphia
For 14 years, I stood parallel with a room-length mirror and participated in a sport fundamentally focused on the curvatures and angles of one’s body — ballet. Proper ballet technique is simple: suck it in.
As I got older, I found myself hating the thing I used to love so much. I told myself it was because ballet was boring and I wasn’t very good at it. Time brings perspective and now I realize my hatred stemmed from my own struggles with my body image, something you don’t need tights and ballet shoes to grapple with. The dance room is in no way the only place in this world with a mirror.
The clinical definition of body dysmorphia is “a distinct mental disorder in which a person is preoccupied with an imagined physical defect or a minor defect that others often cannot see.” This feels cold and clinical: robotic and judgemental. Nine percent of the US population will have an eating disorder at some point in their lifetime, affecting almost 29 million Americans. Something haunting the lives of so many people can not be summed up to something so analytical. The language around body dysmorphia and eating disorders often feel patronizing. “Why don’t you just eat!?!” or “Skinny Legend!” might come from genuine intention but are often more harmful. Athlete or not, young adults must start unlearning these unhealthy habits and change the way we take care of ourselves — both body and mind.
“The language around body dysmorphia and eating disorders often feel patronizing. ‘Why don’t you just eat!?!’ or ‘Skinny legend!’ might come from genuine intention but are often more harmful.”
Eating Disorders and body dysmorphia are complex mental disorders often coupled with trauma, bullying, depression and anxiety. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of mental illnesses. And yet, they are so misunderstood by the general public. Eating disorders and body dysmorphia affect all genders, ages, races and sexual orientations, but some people have a personality predisposition for eating disorders. Along with other performative sports like ice skating, dancers tend to be perfectionists, making them vulnerable to obsessions over food and exercise.
Reporter Isabella Rolz wrote in her Washington Post article “A Ballet Of ‘Living Hell’: Ex-dancer Recounts Her Battle With Anorexia” how “ballet celebrates the body and thinness.” Former dancer Anais Garcia told the story of her experiences as a professional ballerina and battle with anorexia nervosa. Garcia talked about how her teachers called her “too soft” and told her she needed more “muscle tone,” all code words for “fat.” When Rolz asked Garcia’s former teacher about this, the response was “we never tell a student that they’re fat … the student hears what they want to hear.”
Language is important. Comments from parents and mentors have a lasting impact on the way we perceive food and our bodies. Anais Garcia’s dance teacher’s comments were not explicitly acknowledging her weight but were interpreted that way. Changing the tone and words when speaking to someone struggling with body dysmorphia and disordered eating is a small but supportive way of helping. Phrases such as “You look so healthy!” or “You look so unhealthy!” or “You don’t look like you have an eating disorder!” can be triggers. Instead, try using phrases that take away the attention to a person’s physical appearance, such as “You look so happy today.”
“Changing the tone and words when speaking to someone struggling with body dismorphia and disordered eating is a small but supportive way of helping.”
Cultural context also can not be ignored when discussing the language around eating disorders, something covered in the NPR article “‘Eat Up’: How Cultural Messages Can Lead To Eating Disorders” by Carmen Cusido. Most research studies on eating disorders focus on white patients, completely ignoring the BIPOC community. Mae Lynn Reyes-Rodriguez, a clinical psychologist at the University of North Carolina, stresses the need “to develop culturally sensitive treatments.” Reyes-Rodriguez talks about the history of food insecurity leading to the “majority of immigrant women, and some U.S. born Latinas, are given cultural messages that they have to eat all the food on their plate.” In the same article, Lynn Chen, co-founder of Thick Dumpling Skin, talked about her Taiwanese parents encouraging her to eat large quantities of food but emphasized remaining skinny. Language is not a one size fits all and cultural context must be both respected and accounted for when treating eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
“Language is not a one size fits all and cultural context must be both respected and accounted for when treating eating disorders and body dismorphia.”
College presents a new environment for our relationship with our bodies and food. No longer a full-time athlete, I struggled to adapt to a schedule without mealtimes and exercise penciled into the school day. Regular exercise is put on the back burner because of upcoming midterms and meals are skipped when homework carries into the late night. On top of adjusting to a completely new environment and routine, reminders to “keep off the freshman 15” can be suffocating.
As young adults, we are now in charge of taking care of ourselves. But the mirrors from the dance room follow us when we move out and go to college. Suddenly, college students are surrounded by new people and new social pressures to conform to. The stakes of our day-to-day lives may not be as high pressure as the professional dance community, but so many of us put off taking care of our mental health to maintain an outlook of doing great. We so casually say things like “It’s just for my spring break beach body” or “It’s just to lose my holiday weight,” and normalize its damaging effects. Changing the language we use to talk to others and ourselves is a simple way we can shift the way we look at our bodies. Loving yourself — your whole self — is a difficult journey, but I believe it’s a labor of love worth every hard moment.
If you or your loved ones are struggling with eating disorders, disordered eating, or body dysmorphia, here are resources that can help:
National Eating Disorders Collaboration