Ballet's Weight Talk During Puberty Risks Careers, Experts Say

By Elena Vasquez

Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan was 10 years old when ballet teachers first commented on her body. Today she is a principal dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet. Two or three years after those first remarks, a teacher told her parents she needed to lose 10 pounds.

"It was just based on how I looked—no one knew how much I weighed, and there was no medical input," Ryan says. "It completely ruined my relationship with food and led to a number of years of disordered eating."

The advice she received, she adds, "was always really bad." A teacher once suggested an all-liquid diet. Ryan ate mostly chicken broth for a while. No one referred her to a dietitian.

Her story is not unusual, and the industry's emphasis on thinness has not faded. Earlier this year, Youth America Grand Prix faced significant backlash for including a weight field on dancers' registration forms. The competition said some artistic directors and companies had requested it. Dancers took to social media and shared alleged instances of being told they weren't thin enough at the competition.

The takeaways are blunt: body comments during development carry medical and psychological risks that can shorten a dancer's career before it starts.

Why is puberty so risky for dancers?

The pre-professional years collide exactly with the years bodies change most.

"The pre-professional years—when young people are committing to ballet as a potential career—hit right when their bodies are changing," says Sasha Gorrell, PhD, a former American Ballet Theatre dancer who is now an assistant professor at University of California San Francisco's department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "You're in this really vulnerable stage where you're guns blazing, but your body could change so much."

Even a child whose physique meets the classical "ideal" has an unknown adult height and weight. Dietitian Christina Chagaris, RD, who works with dancers from the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City, says a dancer's shape can fluctuate wildly during puberty as the body adjusts to hormonal changes, rapid growth spurts, and training demands.

"When you're going through puberty, it feels like everything is out of your control, especially your body," Ryan says.

In short: students are making career commitments at the one moment their bodies are least predictable.

What does dieting do to a growing body?

The numbers frame the danger. Roughly 25 percent of a person's growth in height happens during puberty. Building that new bone, muscle, and tissue, the body needs more calories than at almost any other time of life.

"Your body is changing so rapidly during puberty," says Naomi Brown, MD, a pediatric sports-medicine specialist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who works with dancers. "The demands on your systems are much higher."

Under-eating at that age raises the risk of relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). The condition weakens strength, endurance, coordination, and concentration. Injury risk spikes, partly through fatigue and brain fog, partly because muscles and tendons recover poorly from everyday microtrauma in class and rehearsal.

The list of possible effects is long:

• Stomach pain, headaches, and frequent colds
• Slowed metabolism
• Depression and anxiety
• Delayed or interrupted periods
• Permanently reduced adult height
• Earlier menopause and fertility issues later in life
• Weaker bones for life

"You lay down about 90 percent of your bone density by age 20," Brown says. "So if you're not having normal estrogen in those teenage years to lock in that calcium, then you're at a much higher risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis when you're older."

"When there isn't enough energy input, our body goes into a stress state," Chagaris says, and anything not necessary for immediate survival gets put on the back burner.

How deep does the psychological damage go?

Recent lawsuits at both the Royal Ballet School and Richmond Ballet have alleged that body shaming and weight demands led to long-term eating disorders and struggles with body dysmorphia.

Ryan still sees a body dysmorphia coach regularly because of her experiences as a young dancer. "There were times early in my career where I would leave class just because I couldn't stand to look at myself," she says.

"It's such a hard, but somehow relevant, part of this career, unfortunately," she adds.

Gorrell notes that most teachers and administrators who tell a dancer to lose weight mean well. Many are repeating what they were told as teenagers, often reflecting longstanding cultural views.

What should teachers do instead?

Gorrell's advice is to stop lecturing and start asking. "There's not a single dancer who doesn't know when they've gained weight," she points out. Commenting on it dismisses their intelligence and raises the risk of disordered eating.

Instead, she suggests teachers check in on how a dancer is doing generally—current stressors, sense of well-being. "In a pre-professional environment, there's a lot to handle, and a lot of times people eat differently when they're anxious or under pressure or unhappy," she says.

Depending on the answer, a dancer might need a referral to a sports dietitian or a psychologist, help finding more inclusive companies, or simply support while riding out the chaos of puberty.

The pressure on students, the reporting makes clear, is unlikely to ease without industry-wide changes to how dancers' bodies are valued. Gorrell puts the responsibility on the system, not the student: "Can we also adjust our eyes within the system, our expectations for what a dancer looks like? We need to constantly revisit how we can do better to create a safer environment for dancers."