A personal message from Theresa, a former ballet dancer
I was a ballet dancer all my life, and by the time I was 12, I was training for multiple hours a day, 6 days a week. I was uneducated in health and nutrition, and believed that losing your period meant you were doing something right in terms of where you should be with your weight. Because of the strict environment I was in, where I was dancing and pushing my body to the limits for many hours each day, I became amenorrheic for about 2 years during high school.
By the time I was 18, I had suffered multiple stress fractures in my tibia, and eventually had to stop dancing because of these chronic injuries. I can see now how distorted my thinking was when I was in the thick of my ballet training, and how I wasn’t fueling my body properly for how much I was exercising every day. I was uneducated on the Triad and its consequences, and so were my instructors/ ballet teachers.
Once I stopped dancing, and began to resume a normal level of exercise and increased my eating, I truly felt stronger than I had when I was dancing 6 days a week, and I know this is related to the increase in my overall energy status.
