Ballet dancer health, blood sugar balance, depression and hypoglycemia

Young ballet dancers often make casual comments about their self-esteem issues. Whether it’s a body image issue, a perfection issue, a weight management issue, or a slightly depressed lack of energy issue, they either don’t come out to say it, or can’t really articulate what the problem is. Recently, when I started reading about hypoglycemia and blood sugar balance, I began to associate its symptoms with many of the claims I had heard.

I became more interested in hypoglycemia and its sometimes subtle symptoms because of a conversation I had with a non-dancer, a talented artist, in another field. This person has performed in many countries, all of her teachers push her forward, and yet he can’t accept the praise of the teachers or peers, or the enthusiasm of the fans, because he just can’t.

The lack of self-esteem in this person confuses me. A person who won the number one state award for acting while still in high school? That’s like winning the ballet competition performing the blue bird or the pas de deux swan lake.

Eating disorder is more broadly defined as behavior that results in an emotional outcome by controlling what you eat. This does not necessarily mean anorexia or bulimia, but it can refer to a practice of self-control or self-approval in terms of the food you eat, the caloric content, and this does not only apply to dancers.

It can be a borderline situation like that of a teenager who insists on being vegan, in which I have personally witnessed the result causing stress fractures in this dancer who still thought she was going to be able to get stronger on pointe and have a professional career. in ballet, while she looked at the x-rays of her.

I recently took a look at hypoglycemia and its symptoms. Now this is complicated. The symptoms are almost unique to the individual. But the dominant symptoms, as I have read, are:

  • sadness
  • self-criticism
  • despair
  • feelings of absolutely no self worth
  • periodic complete lack of energy, dizziness, mental confusion
  • thoughts of suicide, although there is not enough energy to think beyond that

Hypoglycemia is… drum roll… blood sugar too low!

It is caused by a nutritional deficiency of protein, or simply a lack of food.

Hypoglycemia does not mean you are diabetic or near diabetic. More concisely called Reactive Hypoglycemia, this is a condition that results from a poor diet or not eating often enough for whatever reason. Or eating too many carbohydrates without enough protein.

The most common recommendation for hypoglycemics is to eat some protein every two hours.

Also, I would like to mention the rule of nutritionists, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Why? Proteins set your brain chemicals for the day. Skip them and your brain chemicals won’t work properly until the next day IF you eat protein for breakfast.

Dancing parents reading this: How often does your dancer daughter or dancer son run out of the house and skip breakfast because they stayed up late?

And what will they eat when they get to the food dispensers at school? Or will they go hungry until they get to the school cafeteria for lunch? This is a miserable situation for a student who is not an athlete, not to mention a ballet dancer or any other athlete.

And later, when they run away to her ballet academy? Are you one of those ballet parents who have to suffer listening to “I’m not that good”…”I’m not good enough”…and worse? While the ballet teacher tells her that her son should aim higher: audition for professional summer crash courses?

Confused yet? Let me give you some relief. Hypoglycemia without diabetes at http://benjimester.hubpages.com is a revealing discussion. The whole thread is worth reading.

Personally, I think hypoglycemia is caused by:

  • lack of nutrition education
  • processed, fast food, frozen food products
  • not enough time to serve fresh food indicating which foods are nutritious
  • sugar addiction (nutritional ignorance)
  • ignorance about cereals, transgenic cereals, glutin and transgenic sugars

And unfortunately I can’t cover much more here. BUT please, if your child dancer or any member of your family has energy issues or depression, but not severe enough to see your doctor (who probably won’t be nutritionally educated) or therapist, look into hypoglycemia. It’s an insidious condition, but it can be reversed with a good diet!

It is not so difficult. I would love to never hear from a ballet dancer or any other type of artist who feels moody, depressed, sad or hopeless about their talent or potential, when they have no idea where all this negativity is coming from. And they skip meals, snack without nutrition, and have low blood sugar…

I would love to never hear from a sad and depressed ballet parent again, whose incredibly talented son is failing, sinking, not even stepping on water, suffering from body image issues or self esteem issues, and contemplating quitting ballet, or even committing suicide. . Due to lack of nutritional balance.

This may require a lot of extra food preparation for ballet parents! If you are still reading this post, I bet you are okay with that.

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