‘Dying To Be Thin’ –  a review.....

‘Dying To Be Thin’ is a documentary which was filmed in the year 2000 by NOVA.

A 14-year-old looks at her image and says, "I see somebody that is fat and ugly and a disappointment." She is like a large number of young women afflicted with such eating disorders as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Tormented by an irrational fear of being fat, an estimated eight million young women are torturing themselves world wide—sometimes to death.

It’s no wonder eighty percent of women are dissatisfied with their bodies. Driven by the waif-like images flooding the media of popular actresses, models, dancers and celebrities—who can weigh nearly twenty-five percent less than the average  woman—young girls are obsessed with an unattainable image of perfection.

The documentary discusses different types of eating disorders and problems that women face in the entertainment world. After reading through the transcript as research for my inquiry question, I decided that this would make a good piece of literary evidence for my review.

It is a sobering but ultimately hopeful documentary which examines a disturbing increase in the prevalence of eating disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia. It interviews students, dancers, fashion models, and other young women who are seeking recovery or are doing their best to conquer their disease. The transcript from the documentary provided some excellent research for my inquiry question and some insight into the pressures young female dancers feel to conform with the required perfect body image and the terrible consequences they can pay with their health.

The opening interviews give insight into why a dancer will put her health on the line to achieve an impossible ideal in order to fit in with the body ideals promoted in the dance world…………… the documentary begins with the narrator saying “ A dancer  must be abnormally thin. It is a dangerous obsession for many dancers”.

KATEY TRACEY: “If they want thin, I will give them thin. And I did. I dropped more weight in two weeks than I had ever done in my life”.

DR. LINDA HAMILTON: (A former dancer herself who understands the extremes to which a dancer will go) “Dancer thin is not like thin on the street. We're talking about 15 percent below your ideal weight for height, which is basically an anorexic weight. If your career is on the line, if the roles are on the line, whether or not you reach that ideal, you will do practically anything”.

KATEY TRACEY: “It was going from one extreme to the next and people in the dance world they were praising it. They were saying, "Gosh you look so good. It looks nice. You have a new body!"

GABRIEL: “I believe that very few women escape a battle with their bodies. I think that it's to varying degrees, but I think that many women at different points in their lives are unhappy with their bodies. I don't think there are a lot of women who can say, honestly, they love their bodies”.

RUTH STRIEGEL-MOORE: “Today, we're told to believe that we too can look this way if only we work hard enough at it. So there's this whole myth that everybody can achieve the impossible. And that's very damaging. Because if then you don't achieve this look, something is wrong with you. In some ways we all have distorted views of what is beautiful. And the repeated exposure to a particular image teaches you to like that particular image. And we have become so used to seeing extremely thin women that we have learned to think that this is what is beautiful.”

Whilst reading through the complete transcript I was amazed to read that there are some really shocking stories concerning eating disorders and just what women will put their bodies through just to try to get ‘perfection’.

During the documentary, doctors, specialists, dancers, models and young girls who are receiving treatments for their disorders were interviewed.

One dancer who now performs with American Ballet Theatre, Eleena Melamed, who has  suffered from anorexia nervosa since the age of 12 says, ”‘My Anorexic Year’, I call it. I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. I was getting all the good parts in our performances at the school. I was getting all the attention. I was not being ignored anymore. When I was heavy I was ignored instead of nurtured. And when I was really thin I was all of a sudden nurtured and taken care of. And the teachers loved me and they cared about me and it was like I was a whole new person.”

At age 21, Eleena Melamed has also paid a heavy emotional price. A gifted dancer, she was told to lose weight at age 12.

ELEENA MELAMED: “I remember having a teacher come up to me and pinch my back, pinch the skin on my back and say, "What is this? Are you drinking milk? You know you need to lose weight."

Eleena eliminated fat from her diet. In time, she became anorexic.

Despite her fragile state, Eleena's talent did not go unnoticed. At age 17, she was invited to join the prestigious American Ballet Theatre in New York, by artistic director, Kevin McKenzie. But her struggles with weight would continue.

ELEENA MELAMED: “All of a sudden there's that added pressure of being on stage every day next to these amazing, beautiful dancers. And I just...I buckled under the pressure. I could not lose weight. It made me eat more, because I got very depressed. I felt horrible about myself”.

Eleena faced one of the most difficult decisions of her life: whether to pursue her dream to be a professional dancer no matter what the personal cost.

Erika Goodman made that decision many years ago and now, in her 60’s, she lives with the consequences—a lifelong struggle with anorexia and severe osteoporosis. A former Joffrey Ballet dancer, she is no stranger to extreme dieting practices.

ERIKA GOODMAN: “The scale becomes your altar. It becomes the site where you pray every morning. You pray that it will be down another pound or another ounce or anything to show that the work that you're doing—and the work is starving—is working. Because other things in your life aren't working, and it's the one thing you have control over. And that's a major thing. I think that's what keeps a lot of these people in this anorexic mode. It's control. Nobody else can control that for you.

The really perverse irony of this is that what has been taken away from me are my legs. And for somebody who had always been very flexible, I'm very stiff. And, it's only now that I know. It's only when you're paying for it. You're paying for it then, you see, but you don't know. The cash register hasn't rung. It's ringing now. And it's not until it rings. It's like sleeping. You can have your alarm clock set, but it's not until it goes off that you're going to awaken”.

Reading the transcript I learned that there are a lot of underlying problems which spark off problems and issues with young girls’ weight. Leading back to being young children in school there has already been underlying problems such as bullying and name calling which can lead to these kind of issues. One doctor commented that most young girls are already vulnerable before suffering from an eating disorder and  it can stem from parent’s divorce, sexual abuse in which one case mentioned in the documentary where a young 14 year old girl spoke out and said she’d been hiding behind her insecurities and keeping it bottled up and  a secret until she became obsessed with her appearance when her mother moved to Korea for a year to work, she felt lonely and abandoned.

The results of eating disorders throughout the world is shocking.  Anorexia is the most deadly. It has the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness. Approximately half a percent of all the people with anorexia nervosa die every year from malnutrition or other kinds of complications, such as heart attacks. So over the course of 20 years, 10 percent of people with anorexia are going to die from this. Prolonged starvation can cause a number of medical conditions, including dangerously low blood pressure, severe osteoporosis, damage to the kidneys and liver, and ultimately, heart failure. Anorexia is one of the most difficult psychiatric illnesses to treat. Nearly 50 percent of patients will relapse within the first year.

An even more disturbing fact is that at least three out of every hundred girls will develop anorexia or bulimia, often in the wake of puberty, many in the world of dance, fashion, gymnastics and skating.

I think the dvd exposes a negligence in our society in placing pressures on young girls to conform to an unachievable idea of ‘perfect’. As Dr Linda Hamilton comments, for dancers in particular this pressure is on girls who are not overweight to start with.

Even though this narrative is from the year 2000, I think this is still very relevant and important to add to my research and confirmed my own up to date findings from my questionnaire and interviews with dance practitioners and my own experiences and observations.

NARRATOR: “In today's image conscious world, surveys show that 80 percent of women are dissatisfied with their bodies. Girls as young as nine and ten years old are dieting, even though they are at normal weight”.

RUTH STREIGEL-MOORE: “The diet industry is a very, very big industry. It sells the myth of transformation. If you do our product, you, too, can be Princess Diana. You, too, can marry your Prince. You, too, can be wealthy. And it's amazing how people can suspend this belief and buy in to anything. You know, "Lose 30 pounds in five days!" And again, I think it gets nurtured in a culture that values extreme thinness. And of course underneath that is...what's the basic message? The message is, "You're not okay the way you are. You need to be transformed."

NARRATOR: “The mystique of thin began with the arrival of the British model Twiggy, in the late 1960s. Standing five feet, six inches tall, she weighed only 91 pounds and was dubbed Britain's top mini-model.

Since then, fashion models have become increasingly thinner, with body weights nearly 25 percent less than the average American woman, who weighs 140 pounds”.

DR. JOAN BRUMBERG: “I think there are two primary things going on right now with the cultural availability of eating disorders. First the whole society is involved in the perfection game, alright?  That we all can fix our bodies, make our bodies over. And then I think, among young women...they're increasingly tuned in to a celebrity culture where the models and actresses bodies are considerably thinner than they have ever been in the past.
This is very seductive and hard for young girls to resist. This is not about illness. This is about idealized beauty and perfection of a certain type”.

I think the transcript is even and balanced. It is a candid look at body obsession. Using real ‘sufferers’ from the entertainment industry in a series of honest and frank interviews. It hits home its point and is interesting and informative. The real nature of the grief of these case studies is movingly portrayed.

 It gives a little bit of the history of anorexia and bulimia, briefly discusses the biology of people prone to eating disorders and touches on the trigger points that lead to eating disorders (familial and cultural) and that is what I am concerned with in my inquiry, the underlying reasons why people develop eating disorders and whether for female dancers increased health education can help reduce the number of dancers suffering from body image issues and how we as dance practitioners can promote a change in aesthetic demands in the industry. It is my belief if attitudes changed and there was more support for young dancers within the industry it could be more a case of preventative than cure!!!

One of the most revealing interviews for me was the one with Eleena Melamed who only felt valued and nurtured once she became anorexic. That is so tragic ! She was obviously a very gifted and talented dancer and whilst the ballet school supported her once she was sick there was a definite negligence whilst she was a normal weight. That for me really hit home as a sufferer myself of that type of negligence. That is the ‘hole’ that I feel exists – a need to nurture and support dancers to be healthy and happy. 

I think as an educational tool a dvd of actual ‘real’ people who have been in the industry and suffered has more impact than merely reading an article on the same subject especially for younger student dancers and this could be a very valuable teaching tool as it gives you a better perspective and you can connect with the issues and the people on screen. I know I would have found it very useful if I had been shown this whilst a dance student at college. I found it to be very straight forward. There is no sugar coating of the issues.  It speaks of the facts concerning eating disorders without too much superficial information and so is not boring. There is no happy ‘Hollywood’ conclusion, just an insightful look into an all too prevalent   problem.  It is not too graphic as to scare people to death but it does give the  relevant warnings and messages.

“Thin offers hope, but no happily-ever-after ending for these women” as these disorders affect them for the rest of their lives and that is one of the most powerful messages I think as dance practitioners we can give to young female dancers starting out into the industry. The psychological and physical affect of these disorders can be life long and we need to advocate happy, healthy dancers from an early age and not bury our heads in the sand that the problem doesn’t exist – the evidence is clear that it does and as dance practitioners we have a responsibility to discuss it out in the open and a sharing of  real life experiences is an inspiration and can be for a greater good. The message of hope from this is that we all as dance practitioners can promote healthy as the new skinny.

However there is still a need in the dance industry to warn and educate young female dancers of the pitfalls of trying to achieve an impossible body image and be perfect although the desire to get on in the industry when there are so many ‘out of work’ – ie: the supply out weighs the demand - means many individuals will still do anything to land that role or get that ‘dream’ job or college place. Often to fit in with the required ‘look’, girls will take extreme measures to achieve that. By managing one's weight, that can be one way to have power and control. There is nothing more soul destroying than turning up for an audition to be told or see that they only want tall girls when you are 5ft 4ins but there is nothing you can do about your height, however if the dance industry advocates ‘skinny’ dancers as the norm then that is one thing you can control and why eating orders are such a risk in the dance industry. Why should starvation and ill health be the price of success? 

KATE DILLON: “I think that it happens to everybody at some point where you feel one way about yourself. And that your initial...your intuition about who you are is that you're a good person, that you're beautiful, that you're strong, that you're capable. And at some point it's met with an outside force that's telling you, "no, you're none of those things."

“I remember getting ready for my first day of Junior High. And I was sitting at my mirror, putting on my electric blue mascara and my frosted pink lipstick. And I was thinking I was like, "yeah, I'm fine. I'm looking good." You know?. And when I got to school it was just...they were just horrible to me, telling me I was fat. And whether it was in PE or coming home on the bus every day, they'd stand up, and they would jump up and down and chant, "Overweight Kate. Overweight Kate." And I remember just like, you know, I'm like, sitting in the front seat ...I would always wear these massive sweaters...and I was sitting in the front seat and just like, trying so hard not to cry, because I was so embarrassed and horrified”.

Desperate to fit in, Kate took extreme measures.

KATE DILLON: “The end of my seventh grade year I'd lost 30 pounds and I grew like four inches. And I was cool. Suddenly everyone liked me. My plan worked, sadly and unfortunately. But it seems to be that that's the way the culture is, you know? You sort of, you do what they want and they'll say, "Cool. Good. You're good now."

Kate became not just thin, but anorexic. And she caught the eye of the fashion world. Weighing 50 pounds less than what she does today, Kate's image before the camera concealed a painful inner struggle.

KATE DILLON: “I looked beautiful. I mean it's not like...you would not look at that picture and see someone who is feeling bad about themselves, or see somebody who hadn't eaten in two weeks. I mean, I look at my face, my face looks so hollow. I look so...my eyes look like they're bulging out. And I just look so weak.
That was the day that they told me to lose like ten or twenty pounds, and I kind of knew that that was crazy. Like I remember thinking, "From where? Like twenty pounds? How am I going to lose twenty pounds?" And I remember thinking, "I don't have to do this. Like what have I been doing the last couple years? What have I been doing my whole life?"

A year later, Kate walked away from modelling. She was in search of a life where starvation was not the price of success. After leaving her life as a supermodel, Kate Dillon spent the next two years searching for a new career to fit the person she has become.

KATE DILLON: “I wanted freedom from this ideal, from these cultural ideals. I wanted freedom to be who I was, whatever that would be. And if I was the biggest dork in the world, well then that was going to have to be okay. And if I was a big mess, then that was going to have to be okay too. And if I was beautiful, that would be fine. And if I was ugly, that would be fine. But that I didn't want to fight myself any more. That I really wanted to just like unzip this suit that I'd been wearing of, "Like me, like me, like me. Think I'm interesting. I want to be perfect." And just take it off and just expose and just be like, "I'm just who I am."”

I think this piece of literature informs my findings and provides a valuable piece of evidence to support my own research from questionnaires, interviews, observations and experiences in relation to body image issues and pressures especially for young dance practitioners and I feel some relief that my inquiry can be worthwhile and important, if it could just stop one more young female dancer from ‘dying to be thin’ and be just accepted for who they really are, to be in some way instrumental in promoting healthy dancers and changing attitudes towards what is perceived as ‘normal’ for a dancer.

References:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/dying-to-be-thin.html