This is going to be a difficult post for me to write, but I am going to share about my issues with eating. If you are triggered by reading about eating disorders, please skip this post.
I am a classically trained ballet dancer and I have been dancing ever since I was a very little girl. I loved the discipline of ballet and it was something that I wanted to do into my adult life. My dream was to perform for the Royal Ballet and it was something that I worked towards every single day of my life. I would finish school, get the bus straight to ballet and stay there until around 8pm. That was my life every single day of my life.
I was very lean naturally. There was no dieting, I just stayed very skinny, which was probably greatly helped by the fact that I put in 5 hours of exercise every single day. I had a healthy relationship with food at the time and I ate a good amount every single day to fuel my dancing efforts.
Everything was fine until I hit around 15 years old. I was having issues with my knees and it was preventing me from using my pointe shoes. Doctors confirmed after many appointments that I had brittle bones. That was because of the amount of exercise that I was doing, but I wasn’t necessarily fuelling myself with the right foods.
I tried to make a change. And I aimed to improve my diet so that I could carry on with my dance career. Little did I know at the time that it would all be in vein. I was running one day when I was having a day off dancing. The bones in my ankle completely shattered. I went to the hospital and one x-ray in my ankle showed that my dance career was over in an instant. There was no way that my ankle would ever be able to support me on pointes again.
This is where my issues with food started.
Every single day I was exercising for hours at a time. I was temporarily immobile and it drove me mad. I gained a few pounds. Even though it wasn’t noticeable at the time, I could notice it and it drove me mad. I decided that from there, I had to cut down on the food. My dancer’s body needed to stay, even if I could no longer be a dancer.
I was hungry a lot of the time, but I still didn’t think that I had an unhealthy relationship with food. Still eating small portions regularly. I was not hiding food. I was not making myself sick and I still had treats. Little did I know at the time that my BMI was drastically dropping. I was technically starving myself. I only started to notice what was happening and what I was doing to myself when my periods completely stopped. My skin was breaking out. My hair was thinning and I was lacking seriously in energy.
Without getting into it all too much. There was an intervention, doctors’ appointments and therapy that followed. I was then on a much healthier and smarter path. I should have admitted earlier on that I had issues with eating. At that moment I really couldn’t see what was happening or what I was doing.
I wanted to write this blog post is because there are so many people out there have issues with eating. For whatever may cause the issues to begin, I want you to know that there is a way out. Even though there are people that have much deeper issues than I did. I was making a conscious decision not to eat. I caused myself great harm. However, I just want to encourage people to talk, be open with those that you love and look after yourself.