Ballet Beautiful: Transform Your Body and Gain the Strength, Grace and Focus of a Ballet Dancer (8 page)

When I look back at my early approach to dieting, I see clearly why I was destined to fail. My focus was on getting somewhere, but I had no clue how to maintain the results. Many lifelong dieters cringe when they hear the word
maintenance.
Why? Because it’s a word that refers to the plateau that many people reach when they stick to a deprivation-based diet or it reminds them of past failures.

Ballet Beautiful is different. You are working hard to achieve your new Ballet Beautiful body, and maintaining it is simply about finding balance and staying away from the extremes. All you need to do is check in daily with yourself: What did I have for breakfast? Have I eaten enough fruits, veggies, and whole grains today? Should I do a 15-minute workout or a longer one? Have I had enough water today?

Such questions enable you to stay attuned to how you feel and what you need and help you develop the awareness and confidence either to stop eating before you get too full or to correct and adjust your eating habits when life gets hectic and you slip. This is the place where Ballet Beautiful becomes a part of your life, not just a new workout and diet program you are trying. It’s the sweet spot, and I want to help you get there and stay there! It may not sound very sexy, but one of the keys to Ballet Beautiful’s balanced approach is knowing that you can eat a slice or two of pizza and have a glass of wine with friends and still work out the next day with confidence and ease.

All of us have reached for food to comfort ourselves, as a way to feel better when we are sad or simply having a bad day.

Imagine this scenario: You are stressed out and starving when you get home from work. Feeling anxious and on autopilot, you abandon your principle of balance and eat a huge meal followed by dessert. You wake up in the morning feeling bloated, lethargic, and generally upset. Yuck. Now you are experiencing more stress fueled by negative feelings about yourself and your body. What could possibly turn the day around? Skipping breakfast? No. When you go to your closet and look at your skinny jeans, you feel suddenly miserable, convinced that you will never fit in them today. You feel hopeless, you’re angry with yourself, and suddenly you’re dreaming about how great chocolate ice cream would taste right now . . . it’s too late for you this week anyhow, right?

Wrong! I have given in to feelings of self-doubt, even self-loathing, and stood in front of the freezer eating that chocolate ice cream for breakfast. It didn’t make me look or feel very good. I am, however, incredibly happy to say that I learned to identify the problem and correct it, and you can too. I don’t deny myself chocolate ice cream when I really want it; I just ignore the craving before lunch!

When I was in the throes of a moment like this one, I felt totally out of control. I didn’t know that what I really needed to turn my day around was to leave the skinny jeans in the closet and pick a different outfit, eat something healthy and wholesome like a slice of whole-grain bread with fresh avocado, and move on. I also didn’t realize that what I needed most was to be forgiving and kind in how I treated myself, rather than frustrated, angry, and sad. Talk about silencing those nasty negative voices! When you feel backed into a corner, take a minute to reframe your choices.

How did I learn this? Trial and error. In the big picture, chocolate ice cream for breakfast is probably no worse than pancakes or waffles on occasion, but I found that instead of making me feel better, giving in to emotional eating made me feel worse.

Emotional eating is a huge problem for so many of us—but one that we can overcome! In the world of dance, it was easy to absorb and mimic the bad habits of others, and it was also hard to let those habits go. In developing my own program, I started paying better attention to my own patterns of emotional eating. I learned to identify my triggers for emotional or thoughtless eating so that I could consciously avoid certain situations and realign myself. I work to pay attention to these triggers to this day.

Let’s back up a minute. If you have woken up feeling puffy and lethargic, take a moment to recognize these as physical qualities. Perhaps you feel bloated because you have PMS, or because you drank two glasses of wine the night before and had too
many olives before dinner or an overly salty meal. Bloatedness can even come from eating a high-fiber meal before dinner when your body isn’t used to it. It can be hard not to feel bad about your body and yourself when you feel like this. But there is always a physical reason behind bloating and lethargy. It could be broccoli rabe that makes you feel bloated! The point is that it doesn’t have to be bad things that make you feel bloated—it might be the high-fiber toast or fresh mango slices you had for breakfast!

Now, take a moment to follow the trail: if your body feels bloated, how does that make you feel
emotionally
? Maybe the bloating makes you feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, sad, or just plain bad about yourself. These negative feelings are more than likely left over from your other experiences with food. It’s so common for women (and men!) to turn to food when they are uncomfortable with their feelings. This can begin early in life—perhaps your mother gave you a bottle as soon as you fussed, or cookies when you cried. Your family culture may have been one that turned to food not only in celebration but also in times of stress or crisis. While eating food is a natural, purely human response, the danger comes when you eat too much because your eating is prompted by emotions (especially negative ones!) rather than your body’s natural cycle of hunger. This is the cycle we want to—and can—break.

The next time you find yourself thinking about or reaching for your comfort foods, take these two steps:

1.
Take a deep breath and let it out.

2.
Then ask yourself if you are feeling physical hunger or if you are just tired, thirsty, or upset.

If you take the time to become aware of whether what you are feeling is actual hunger or another feeling that is emotional in nature, then you give yourself the opportunity to break an unconscious habit of eating emotionally. These two steps may seem oversimplistic, but I assure you that they work. They can also help you make
better choices about the food you eat when you are feeling emotionally overwhelmed and help you regain your inner balance. Why? Because all of us have the power to become aware of how we are feeling and to choose not to let that have an impact on how we eat.

You can also learn to indulge your cravings in a balanced, moderate way. I have found moderate indulging in some of my favorite foods, foods that once might have been considered forbidden, is one of the greatest things I can do to keep my body in balance. I eat chocolate every day! I indulge in a little bit of cheese and wine before dinner most nights and don’t set a lot of “off-limits” rules about food. But I also pay attention to how these favorite foods make me feel. If I’m starving before dinner, I try to start by eating raw veggies and hummus and a few olives before I dive into the cheese (goat cheese, not triple cream brie!). Then, when I have a small bite of the cheese, I really savor it! I take the time to slow down and enjoy the experience of eating. This helps me stay in touch with how I feel and lets me feel satisfied with less. On weeknights when I am training early the next morning, I usually don’t finish my glass of wine. But on a weekend I allow myself an extra drink if I feel the need.

I also don’t skip meals, no matter how busy I am or how late I am running. I always grab a snack and often bring it with me so that I don’t find myself stuck somewhere—either without food or with the only choice being a candy bar! You know it as well as I do: skipping meals leads to poor food choices.

As you will see in
Chapter 8
, one of the best ways to stay in balance is to eat frequently—I eat probably two or three snacks a day and three to four small meals a day. That may sound like a lot, but if you are choosing foods that your body needs and uses, then eating often helps your body burn calories and keeps your blood sugar stable.

As I made the transition from the rigors of dancing with a ballet company to founding and becoming CEO of Ballet Beautiful, I had to learn a powerful lesson: how to take care of myself. The foundation of taking care of myself, I realized, was paying attention to how my body felt. When I was pushing through my pain, not admitting to myself that my foot was injured, I was unwittingly undermining my own recovery.

Over time I began to do regular check-ins, asking myself questions and letting my body communicate with me:

•
Is that a sore muscle or a tender joint?

•
Did that snack make me feel good and grounded or slightly off?

•
Why do I feel groggy?

•
What did I eat that makes me feel so good today?

I realized that by zeroing in on what hurt, what made me feel strong, what felt tight, or what felt weak, I could then tailor my workouts even more specifically.

Once you pinpoint how your body feels and begin to listen to your body with new awareness, you will be able to make connections between what you are doing (eating, exercising, and so on) and how you are feeling. You can then use this insight to self-monitor and adjust your workouts. As you will soon see, there are many options for workouts—single workouts, combined workouts, short workouts, and long workouts—and several areas of the body to target during your workouts. The more aware and attuned to yourself you are, the better able you’ll be to design a specific workout for any given day or week and the more engaged you’ll be in it. And enhancing your engagement will not only reinforce your commitment but help you achieve your Ballet Beautiful goals!

Here is a quick checklist you can use to isolate how you feel:

1.
Are you energized?

2.
Do you feel fatigued?

3.
Do you feel irritable or grouchy?

4.
Are you generally happy and content?

Once you’ve pinpointed how you feel, take a step back and think about your day: Do you feel good about what you ate? Did you treat your body well with a healthy breakfast and fresh, whole foods throughout the day? How does this make you feel physically? If you ate a lot of unhealthy or processed foods, what’s the correlation to
your emotional state? Did you move your body? How did that make you feel? Stepping back a couple of times a day and really taking the time to focus on how you feel will help you find the elements in your day that contribute to your well-being.

One important lesson I’ve learned is that it’s possible to learn to truly like healthy foods and exercise. Many of the women I work with have been shocked at not only how good they feel once they change their eating habits, but how good real food actually tastes. Begin by paying attention to the way certain foods make you feel. If you are feeling good after you eat something, it’s probably good for you. If you feel heavy, sleepy, or bad about yourself, the reason could be the high starch or sugar content or the additives and chemicals (yes, the chemicals in processed foods do have physiological effects!) of food you’re eating that is unhealthy or perhaps best enjoyed in moderation. You can learn to enjoy indulging in such food, savoring each bite, but then move on!

Physical and emotional balance are closely intertwined, and both kinds of balance begin by eating well and often, making healthy food choices, and paying attention to how you feel. When these habits are in place, you give yourself the opportunity to maintain mental balance, defined as thinking clearly, staying focused, and following through on your goals (whether a daily, a two-month, or a lifelong goal).

Mental balance is the key to your baseline—that sense of being connected to the inner you, grounded in real feelings, centered in yourself, and confident as you approach each and every day. When you build mental balance, you are better able to manage challenges, withstand setbacks, and keep charging ahead.

Let’s do a quick review of how to make sure you’re living in balance:

1.
Are you taking care of your body
? Make sure you work out at least three days a week, with five or six days being optimal. A workout can be as brief as one
15-minute Body Blast or as challenging as a 60-minute Classic. Or it can be a well-targeted hybrid workout focused on arms and legs, combining two 15-minute segments.

2.
Are you keeping your emotional eating in check
? Are you developing awareness of your habits? Are you making sure you’re really hungry when you reach for a snack? Are you pausing to tune in to any uncomfortable feeling that may be triggering a craving?

3.
Are you regularly rewarding yourself
? As you’ve learned in this chapter, becoming familiar with the difference between hunger and anxiety, stress, or fear enables you to choose doing something nice for yourself as a reward instead of drowning your feelings in jellybeans. Non-food-related ways to treat yourself and stay on track include buying a magazine and nail polish, treating yourself to an at-home spa experience, giving yourself a few minutes to browse your favorite e-shopping site, or even taking a power nap!