Imagine looking at yourself in the mirror for hours a day. Watching your body and comparing how it moves in comparison to others. Assessing your figure in a full-length, wall-to-wall mirror in nothing but a leotard. That's what little girls and women who love to dance and dream of joining a ballet company do. Every day they walk a thin line between their ambition to create a perfect, size-less ballerina body and a dangerous obsession with their weight. It's nearly unavoidable in a profession so fiercely driven by a competitive well-known ballet body ideal.
Tracy is an ordinary girl with an extraordinary pursuit. She is featured in a new book called Girls by the McPhee sisters, who traveled the country chronicling the lives of girls in America today. Tracy was four years old and already passionately involved in ballet when her father left the family. Ironically, it wasn't pressure from ballet that contributed to her eating disorder, but the desire to dance that helped her overcome it. Tracy required hospitalization to heal physically and used ballet as a source of inspiration to recover mentally. Her dance instructor understood the seriousness of this poor-body-image driven disease and insisted Tracy gain weight in order to move up through the ballet ranks.
While ballet dancers are expected to weigh 10 - 20% below accepted standards, they aren't the only women looking at their bodies critically. From athletes to royalty, the way women perceive their bodies can control and destroy lives. Eating disorders are psychologically and physiologically damaging. It isn't about being hungry or not being hungry, it's about having control over something and obtaining perfection. Girls learn from watching television and reading magazines that thin women are happy, loved and successful. If a young girl lacks any of those things in her life she may feel by at least being thin, her other needs or insecurities may be fulfilled by her perfect weight.
Here are some guidelines (Adapted from BodyLove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves, Rita Freeman, Ph.D.) that can help girls work toward a positive body image:
- Listen to your body. Eat when you are hungry.
- Be realistic about the size you are likely to be based on your genetic and environmental history.
- Find an exercise that you enjoy.
- Expect normal weekly and monthly changes in weight and shape.
- Work towards self-acceptance and self forgiveness- be gentle with yourself.
- Ask for support and encouragement from friends and family when life is stressful.
- Decide how you wish to spend your energy -- pursuing the "perfect body" or enjoying family, friends, school and, most importantly, life.
