Disordered Eating in Dance

When it comes to discussing eating disorders in dancers, I seem to spend all my time either trying to convince my non-dancing friends that the majority of dancers do not have an eating disorder, or trying to convince my colleagues who do work in dance that it is a serious problem that needs addressing. While to non-dancers the image of the anorexic ballet dancer is at least familiar if not cliched, to many dancers there is a denial regarding the degree to which disordered eating is a serious and wide-spread problem and there is a sense of many people and companies being in denial about the severity of the issue. In reality the scope of the problem sits somewhere between the two outlooks - disordered eating is a serious problem for a significant minority of dancers.