My 12 Year Fight to Achieve the Perfect Ballet Body

Content Warning: Disordered eating. The following work contains sensitive content. Please be advised.

Growing up, I’d heard the stories of dancers starving themselves to have the “perfect” body. I’d heard about the competitiveness and the body image issues that stemmed from doing ballet as a teenage girl. In an interview with Elice McKinley, ballerina and bioprocess engineer, she claimed that most dancers struggle with Body Dysmorphic Disorder, in which they become obsessed with nonexistent flaws of their body. In the 2010 Best Picture nominee Black Swan, Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers becomes completely consumed with the idea of becoming the “perfect” dancer to the point that it drives her insane, leaving her mentally and physically destroyed. When interviewed by a student at Dominican University of California, one ballerina said, “I think I would be lying if I didn’t come to class, like every day walking in, I see someone who’s slim and slender and say like, ‘wow I wish I looked like that.’” Another participant in the interview expanded even further by saying, “I would change parts of my body because I think dancers with really long legs and who are really skinny, don't have a butt and don't have boobs get rewarded for their body.” I, however, never thought I struggled with this until I was nineteen years old, crying in my now ex-boyfriend’s lap and opening up about how insecure I actually am.

Suck your stomach in. Keep your head up straight. Make sure your arms are relaxed. Don’t stick your butt out. These are the thoughts that raced through my head during ballet class from age eight to seventeen. Even now, as a twenty-year-old film student who has since stopped doing ballet, these thoughts occasionally race through my head as I hold my shirt up and look at my stomach in the mirror. Despite this, I can say that unlike other former and current ballet dancers, I never developed an eating disorder; however, this constant pressure did force me to develop a strange relationship with food—I used to skip proper meals and gorge myself on unhealthy snacks. I believed that skipping meals would keep my waist small and my stomach from bloating, which was often a source of my anxiety and body dysmorphia. Tying my worth with how flat my stomach is gave me an unnatural fear of eating. Even now, I instinctively check my stomach before I take a shower to monitor myself.

Before I took my first ballet class at age eight, I was told, on occasion, that I was chubby. After my stomach began to flatten, the comments stopped. Over the summer, when I wasn’t taking classes and I would gain weight, the references to my stomach and thighs would make their comeback. When I stepped into a studio for the first time, I was shocked to see two out of four of the walls covered in mirrors. I was able to see the entirety of my body all at once. The reason for dance studios having mirrors is for that reason—to allow the dancers to see their bodies. This is so we can make sure we’re correct in our movements and alignment. However, Erica Hornthal, a dance therapist, also believes that mirrors in the dance studio negatively impact students. She claims that the constant use of the mirror causes students to “[fixate] on body image not self expression.” I believe that Hornthal is accurate in her assessment; seeing myself in the mirror like that for the first time made me believe what people had been saying about my body was indeed correct. I didn’t understand that the image of my body was warped until after starting to get comments about how small I am in college.

The journey to accepting my body and repairing my relationship with food has been long and arduous. I’ve been making progress since junior year of high school. When I woke up, before I got on the bus or in my car, I would make sure to grab at least an Eggo Waffle before walking out the front door. There was a period, from eighth grade to tenth grade in which I stopped packing proper lunches and didn’t buy the food that the school had offered. By eleventh grade, I was forcing myself to make a sandwich and grabbing snacks to put in my lunchbox. This process has been four years in the making. However, from January to April of 2021, I had a major setback. With trouble arising in my platonic and romantic relationships, I didn’t know how to cope. I forcibly isolated myself, letting the loneliness crush me under its weight, and threw off my eating pattern. I would starve myself for days only to binge-eat DoorDash orders for the following days. If my stomach bloated, I went on multiple hour long walks that day. This was the vicious cycle I trapped myself in.

As of late, I’m trying to recover from this relapse, but it’s proven to be difficult to re-adjust. The path to a healthy body image and relationship with food has been long and tiring, with both wins and losses. The most important lesson I learned from being a former dancer struggling with body dysmorphia is that what I had before wasn’t normal and should have never been. As Taylor Swift stated in the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, “I thought that I was supposed to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it.” I’ve learned, throughout my twelve-year battle, that you aren’t supposed to feel that way. The impossible standards pushed on both women and ballet dancers made me feel like this was reasonable, and this is why my journey is not yet over. ◆

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