Eating Disorders and Self-Awareness

According to the American Psychological Association, “eating disorders begin as a desire to escape from self-awareness”. A dancer has many demands expected of them and if failing short of these demands a dancer will succumb to any means of trying to achieve the unfair demands. A high level of self-awareness for how others perceive them will develop, then resulting in “unflattering views of one’s self”. Accompany this with emotional distress like depression and anxiety disorders, a dancer can narrow their train of thought primarily on the faults and problems they believe they have, even if they may not. Through all of this, a normal behaviour towards food is discontinued and a dancer starts to have irrational beliefs and thoughts about their weight and eating habits. “Eating disorders start as an altered mental perception due to stress placed upon dancers by instructions. The altered mental perception explodes into eating disorders, which in turn has direct negative impacts on the brain.”

An obsession with food and eating is a very common Psychological effect of an ED. This involves obsessing over how much you eat, how much intake of fat, carbohydrates, or sugars there is in a specific product. There’s also an increase in “emotional responsiveness, dysphoria, and distractibility and suicidal thoughts”. Even if recovered from an ED, sufferers will still be obsessing with thoughts of food and eating. The psychological effects of eating disorders are lasting, and it is clear that those with eating disorders will never fully recover. (tamsewell, 2011)

After conducting an Interview with a Principle and Dance Teacher at an everyday dance school, I was able to gain more insight on what her perception of the situation was and where she bel...

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...ody’ very popular and very much a requirement when wanting to get into the career of dance. Right now we are moving ahead and away from stereotypes and wanting a specific type of person in many different issues, why can’t we move forward in dance? We are standing still in something that we (that is, the audience, dancers and teachers) are comfortable in. We are all too frightened to think differently and stand up and say I want to do it this way. Which is very unfortunate, think about how many amazing dancers there are in the world but have been rejected due to them having the ‘wrong image’.

None of these answers really reveal anything that people didn’t already know. Not all dancers have body image issues and if they do not all dancers have that much trouble that they go to such lengths of an eating disorder. But unfortunately these answers just reveal more of the