NUTRITION BASICS FOR DANCERS
Picture this: you’ve just found out you have an audition next week. You are feeling bloated, you haven’t been training much, you think you’ve been eating too much, and your mindset is all over the place. Panic starts to set in! What’s the quickest way I can lose weight and look my best for the audition? Easy - just don’t eat.
So, you start every day for the next week on the treadmill, trying to burn off all those snacks you had last week.You do a really good job at restricting your calories as much as possible, and only binge a few times. Then, the audition comes around. You still hate the way your body looks. But the worst part, is that your audition is a complete flop. You had no focus, you couldn’t remember the choreography, you were falling out of turns and you rolled your ankle on a jump. You’re better than this, why did you perform so badly? Because you’ve got no food in your belly!
Let’s span out, and look over at other physical disciplines. Sprinters, marathon runners, swimmers, basketball players, footy players… they’re all athletes just like us. Do you think they have the same eating habits that we have? No, they take their nutrition very seriously and make sure they eat enough every single day to optimise their performance. They fuel their body like an athlete.
And, they don’t focus on the way their bodies look as a goal, their goal is to perform better. But, their bodies, as a side effect, look pretty damn good, let's be honest. The elite nature of their job means their overall body fat is pretty lean.
You don’t see other athletes starving themselves. So why do dancers? This is important for us to look into. Why do so many dancers suffer from body dysmorphia? Why are so many dancers chronic under-eaters? Why do we want to punish our bodies?
A lot of it has to do with our mentors we grew up with. And it’s not their fault. Generations on generations of dancers, all feeding each other the same toxic advice that leads to all kinds of nasty side effects. I want to change this. If I can help one dancer in this video my work here is done.
If we change our mindset around our identity, and see ourselves as athletic artists, then everything changes. We can’t be depriving our bodies, because our bodies need fuel to thrive.
The constant looking in mirrors, being compared to others, having to fit into certain moulds.. But that’s such an outside in approach. What if we flipped it, and looked from the inside out? What if we focused on what our body could do athletically, and is your body functioning optimally as a dancer?
If not, there are steps you can take to get there (Like signing up for my training program), and that will result in you getting the results you’re chasing down the completely wrong path. You can’t get there from there.
Let’s look at the basics of nutrition:
In terms of energy, a basic way to look at it is - Calories in vs. calories out
Calories in- all the food that you eat.
Calories out- is all the calories you burn.
But there’s much more than just 1 way to burn calories.
BMR- Basal Metabolic Rate
NEAT- Non exercise activity thermogenesis
PA- Physical activity
TEF - Thermic effect of food.
All this together is TDEE
Why is it important to know this? It’s important that you know you’re always burning calories, not just when you’re exercising,
When I was 18 and about 7 years prior to studying nutrition, I learnt about calories for the first time, and I thought “oh wow, so I’ll just make sure whatever calories I burn in my exercise I eat less of, then I’ll lose weight”... which is so wrong, because I wasn’t taking into account all the other ways my body burns calories. I thought it was a really good idea to eat like 700 calories a day.
I thought I was the only genius in the world to figure it out. I lasted about 2 days, and then I had the worst headache I’ve ever had, and quickly realised this was not the way to go about it. If you don’t know this, you could be significantly undereating as you don’t realise how much you’re burning. The more you can get educated as a dancer, the more ahead you’ll be. Learn from my mistakes!
When you are in a caloric deficit, you start to move less, as your body wants to save as much energy as possible. Your NEAT in particular is suffering.
If you’re exhausted, you’re probably not gonna wanna get up off the couch to clean the kitchen. You’re probably gonna ask your partner or mum to get your drink for you because you don’t want to get up. These are all the effects of your body trying to tell you “hey, we need to reserve as much energy as possible, I’m working overtime here, give me a second to catch up”.
And this, in turn, will cause you to burn less calories than normal, which ultimately is going against your goal of weight loss. Instead, if you chose to prioritise athletic performance, yes of course you will have days where you don’t want to get off the couch, but you’ll be fuelling your body with enough calories, which will in turn help you recover, get you up and moving faster, and keep you more consistent overall.
So, how many calories should you be eating as a dancer? You should be on maintenance calories. This means you’re not trying to gain weight, you’re not trying to lose weight. You’re eating for optimal athletic performance only.
Let’s calculate what our maintenance calories are.
First up your BMR. There are several formulas to calculate BMR; this is a pretty common one:
Mifflin-St Jeor Equation
For men:
BMR=10×weight in kg+6.25×height in cm−5×age in years+5
For women:
BMR=10×weight in kg+6.25×height in cm−5×age in years−161
Next, we calculate your activity level:
Sedentary (little or no exercise): BMR × 1.2
Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week): BMR × 1.375
Moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week): BMR × 1.55
Very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week): BMR × 1.725
Extra active (very hard exercise/physical job & exercise 2x/day): BMR × 1.9
Finally, to find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, take your BMR and multiply it by the activity factor:
TDEE=BMR×Activity Factor
Or honestly you can just look up a calorie calculator online, they tend to be pretty accurate most of the time. But I will reiterate, I am recommending maintenance calories only here, calorie counting is not for everyone, and it can be best to be working with a coach if you have a specific goal in mind.
Once you’ve found your maintenance calories, what do we do now? We look at the macro break down of the food we eat.
There are 3 macronutrients every food (except alcohol) falls under. Each of these play a unique and essential role in supporting your performance and overall health.
First up, carbohydrates. Carbs are our bodys primary and preferred source of energy, particularly for the brain and during exercise.
Proteins are made up of amino acids, which are the building blocks for most structures and functions of the body.
Fats are very important for overall health, they play a central role in maintaining healthy organs, and promote healthy cell function. They’re a concentrated source of energy, containing 9 calories per gram in comparison to protein and carbs which both have 4 calories per gram. So we don’t need as much fat as the other 2 due its density but it’s important to always incorporate nonetheless.
To split the macros for optimal performance, we want about 50-65% carbs, 20-35% fats, and we want our protein to be around 1.6-2.4g per kg of bodyweight per day.
But, again, be mindful that all this info is very individual, even for each individual dancer, based on a number of factors. Take it all with a grain of salt. I do recommend that if you're really serious about this get in touch with a coach.
