Ballet Beautiful: Transform Your Body and Gain the Strength, Grace and Focus of a Ballet Dancer (7 page)
Authors: Mary Helen Bowers
One thing I’ve learned from working with thousands of women around the world is that each individual is motivated in a singular way. You may be motivated to do Ballet Beautiful to elongate and tone your body and improve your posture. Your friend may be fixated on losing weight around her middle and having a healthier heart. Still another woman may be motivated to get her entire body one or two sizes smaller so she can wear shorts in the summer and feel confident.
Or your goal may have nothing to do with weight. You may feel sluggish and moody. You may have heard that “eating clean” can boost your energy and make you clearheaded. You may be already convinced that if you eat foods that are closer to nature, your body
will respond intuitively. And it’s true: whole foods make you feel lighter, think more clearly, and look your best and brightest.
As you move into the next chapter, you will bring together your mindset and your goals to make sure these are aligned for balance and success.
The Perils of the Scale
T
o weigh or not to weigh—that is indeed a good question. I am of two minds on this topic. On the one hand, weighing yourself can help you stay attuned to your body and cue you into what can happen when you indulge in your favorite gelato one too many times or when you might even be losing too much weight. On the other hand, weighing yourself can become obsessive and lead to undereating . . . which in turn can lead to yo-yo dieting. Again, my approach is all about balance: using a scale can help you stay on track . . . if you don’t overdo it. It’s sort of like counting calories—it’s a useful practice for some people and destructive for others. My advice is not to obsess over the number and to keep the focus on your health and happiness. If you need to put the scale away, you will be able to notice changes in your body—how your clothes fit, how you feel—without focusing too much on numbers.
The more you work out, the stronger you feel. The stronger you feel, the more grounded you are. It’s a positive feedback loop that keeps on giving.
So are you doing Ballet Beautiful to feel more confident?
Are you motivated by your own desires or the expectations of others?
My point here is to listen to
your
motivation. Stay in touch with
your
goal.
As you focus on your goals, know that as you get more into your Ballet Beautiful lifestyle, your goals will naturally shift. This is a good thing. You will accomplish one small goal and then want to set another for yourself. This may take two weeks or two months. The amount of time doesn’t really matter. What matters is you.
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Revise your own goals as you progress
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Re-envision the end result
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Reward yourself along the way
Break the habit of using food as a reward for dieting! This is a negative cycle and closely tied to the overeating/undereating cycle. Find rewards for yourself that are not in conflict with your goals and embrace them! It could be taking a long soak in bath salts and indulging in an at-home spa evening in a face mask and your robe. Maybe it’s a much-needed time-out from your life with a steaming pot of tea and your favorite novel, or a long walk when you get home from work. Rewards are important because they help you maintain your balance. Just remember, using food as a reward and looking forward to a large pizza and a pint of ice cream will not have the same effect!
In the next chapter, we will delve more into what it takes to create balance in your diet and in your life. Balance is a key to the Ballet Beautiful mindset that provides the foundation for flexibility in every way.
Achieving Balance and Paying Attention to How You Feel
T
he life of a professional ballerina requires incredible physical strength, mental stability, and confidence—not only to stay committed to an art that makes such extreme physical demands, but to gather the pluck to perform onstage night after night in front of thousands of people.
The daily physical routine is brutal—it’s no wonder that ballet dancers are famous for their discipline! When you spend more than 70 hours a week pushing your body to the max, in constant search of physical and artistic perfection, discipline is not optional. You live, think, dance, and even dream about ballet, almost by default, because you just don’t have time for anything else. Days spent sewing and breaking in new shoes (sometimes as many as three or four pairs a day!), stretching, and rehearsing are punctuated by the bliss of an evening performance and the moment when your soul can really expand onstage. It’s an unbelievably demanding lifestyle that takes a tremendous amount of dedication and focus, all of which hangs on a critical inner balance.
That is the tricky part. Finding balance in a world defined by extremes is really tough! I was counseled on multiple occasions to “put my blinders on,” to “ignore everything and everyone around me,” to focus only on dance. As an artist and as a woman, that wasn’t the right formula for me. It made me feel caged in and stunted, like I couldn’t grow or breathe. When I began living a rich life for myself outside of the theater, I realized that I needed to be more conscious about balance and began knitting together the important tasks of taking care of myself, eating right, and relaxing.
To achieve lasting success and happiness in anything you are doing, to stay grounded, focused, and confident, finding balance is a must. Without balance, you risk a burnout and all of its side effects.
I was fortunate to learn early in my career that to take great care of my body I would have to train outside of the dance studio. I also learned (through considerable trial and error) that extremes in my diet led to unhappiness, insecurity, and physical instability. I may be a ballerina by training, but my body is made just like yours. I’ve gone through bouts of extreme dieting, to disastrous effect: I’ve learned the hard way that losing weight too fast ultimately backfires because you come to obsess over food and gain weight all over again in the end. This is not a healthy or productive way to live. In fact, it’s incredibly frustrating and inefficient—for your metabolism, your mindset, and your body.
Finding balance in your diet and fitness routine will help you lose weight, look and feel better, and, most importantly, maintain those hard-earned results! While a quick fix can be incredibly seductive, I have learned that the true value of a fitness and lifestyle program is measured in how well it can be maintained. This means getting away from extremes (undereating or overeating, total lack of exercise or obsessive exercise) to stay focused and on track with your health and happiness. I cannot emphasize this enough! Just as I learned to balance my ballet classes, rehearsals, and performances with my Ballet Beautiful program and cross-training to keep my body strong and fit while dancing professionally, I have learned to achieve balance in my diet and my mind.
As Jenna described the program, “The Ballet Beautiful workouts are so portable and low-gear by nature, I find myself able to do a little bit when I’m just standing still. The
workout becomes a more integrated way of movement, and a more constant part of my life—rather than me having to leave my life and go to the gym. I can really stay connected to myself and my identity even when I share the workout with others.”
Balance is not simply about developing the strength and muscularity to perform the perfect grand jeté or triple pirouette. It’s also about learning to stay grounded in yourself so that you know what you need, you keep your priorities in line, and at the same time you remain flexible and forgiving enough to not push yourself in counterproductive ways.
Balance also means staying in touch with how you feel. If you find yourself swinging from a lot of energy to a little, or waking up one morning feeling great and the next feeling glum, then you might be doing something else to trigger these mood shifts. Balance begins with the physical, but it’s equal parts emotional and mental—you cannot have one without the other.
To keep your body in balance, you must:
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Learn to listen
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Avoid deprivation
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Know when to move on if you have overindulged
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Always consider your body’s needs
As we’ve talked about throughout the book, depriving your body leads to one thing: overeating and imbalance. Deprivation is never good for the body. Our bodies work best when they are receiving energy and nutrients from healthy, whole foods. This could mean eating several small meals and snacks throughout the day or eating a healthy, balanced three meals a day. One good rule of thumb is to eat something healthy every four hours and try to avoid getting ravenous. (See the chapters in
Part III
for healthy snack and small meal suggestions!)
By eating regularly, you help your body maintain blood sugar, which wards off cravings that can get uncontrollable (for sugar and starchy carbs especially!) and keeps you feeling balanced. Going long stretches without eating will make your blood sugar drop and might leave you feeling light-headed, grouchy, and out of sorts. Often you will then eat too much once you do eat!
I think of deprivation as a dieting disaster, ruining your metabolism and setting you up for a nasty cycle of restricting and overeating. By now you should see these responses as red flags—extremes that threaten your balance, health, and success. In
Chapter 8
, I will share the specifics of planning and putting an eating plan into place, but for now I want you to focus on identifying and avoiding the triggers that lead to overeating—defined as emotional or thoughtless eating of extra calories that your mind never processes and your body doesn’t need. This could be food you consume while driving, talking on the phone, standing in front of the fridge, or sitting in front of the TV. The best way to combat overeating is to take note that it’s happening! You can’t enjoy your food and find satisfaction if you don’t even realize that you are consuming it.
Are You Undereating, Overeating, or Eating Just Enough?
O
ne of the best ways to make changes in the margins and avoid extremes is to stay flexible in your mind. As you will see in the coming chapters, flexibility enables you to forgive yourself when you’ve had a bad day, stay focused on your
simple steps to goal achievement,
and figure out how to eat just enough.
Overeating and undereating are often a nasty cycle of imbalance, frustration, and emotional pain. In my own experience, I discovered a terrible causal relationship between the two: undereating often causes overeating, and vice versa. Ballet Beautiful is about celebrating your body and nurturing it to be its best, its strongest and most flexible; there is no room for that behavior here. Undereating is a punishment for your body when what it craves is the reward of proper nutrition. Undereating is also guaranteed to create wild cravings and throw your entire body and metabolism out of balance, potentially making you unhappy and overweight in the end.
Working out regularly is another important way to get into balance and stay there. Learning to listen to your body could mean noting whether you feel better working
out in the mornings or the evenings—and then setting a program that works for you, satisfies you, and helps you achieve and maintain your goals. If you hate to work out in the morning, I am not going to tell you that is the best plan. Maybe for you it’s best to work out in the evenings, when you can really let go of the stress of your day, focus on yourself, and enjoy yourself. But if work deadlines, family obligations, or invitations to happy hour always get in the way of your working out at night, I’m going to strongly suggest that you find a way to make exercise a part of your morning or midday routine.
One way to stay motivated is to listen to your body and pay attention to how good you feel when you do work out. This kind of attunement is a key to motivation. We all have worked out even when we didn’t feel like it, knowing that it’s going to make us feel so much better. Play this forward: when you feel sluggish, stressed, or time-constrained, remind yourself of this awesome cause-and-effect. Thinking about how great I’ll feel after my workout always motivates me to push through!
Just as I don’t skip meals, I always find at least 15 minutes each day to work out. Even when my day lasts 16 hours, rushing from meetings and training sessions, writing for my blog, and managing my growing Ballet Beautiful business, I find a little time to move, just for me. I know that I am lucky because I can often sneak in my own exercise when I am training or teaching class. But that doesn’t happen every day; there are some days when I can’t even put 15 minutes together to work out. I try to remember, however, the importance of balance and maintenance. So, on those days, I find myself doing a quick version of my Cardio Swan Arms at night while waiting for the pasta to boil, or some ab work before my shower in the morning. Remember: a little bit can go a long way—and every little piece counts!
Regular exercise has a very important domino effect: the more you exercise, the more your body gets accustomed to the physical activity, and the more the exercise invigorates you by speeding up your metabolism (so you’re burning fat throughout the day!), the sharper your focus becomes and the longer your attention span. You can suddenly become more efficient, more confident, and suddenly more productive.
It doesn’t take a professional training program with five hours a day or more of physical exercise to make this happen! Even when you are busy, if you make time for 10 or 15 minutes of exercise, you will feel better about yourself, make better food choices, and be more likely to work out again tomorrow.
