Dance department holds meeting to discuss eating disorders

Written By Kimmie Prokurat

As the demand for dancers to have a slim body persist, the new dance department chair kicked off the school year with a mandatory meeting for all dance majors centered on eating disorders.

Garfield Lemonius implemented this presentation with the Renfrew Center Foundation for Eating Disorders in Oakland to ensure that all of the dancers are healthy in every aspect of their lives while training at Point Park.

“I wanted to reach the entire student body and let them know they are not alone,” Lemonius said.

“The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: ‘me too’.” This quote spoken by Brene Brown began and set the tone of the assembly.

This was followed by a video put together by the Dove campaign which showed the results of a sketch artist’s astonishingly brutal interpretation of a woman using only her description of herself to prove how harshly women today interpret their own beauty.

Heather York, the professional relations representative and presenter from the Renfrew Center explained that this is a systemic cultural problem that can often be traced back to our childhoods.

York emphasized the seed of unrealistic body expectations that is planted showing Barbie and GI Joe measurements as if they were scaled out to the size of a real human. According to the presentation, Barbie is 7 feet tall and anatomically could never actually give birth to a child if she were real; proving just how unattainable these body shapes truly are.

The Renfrew Center used an outside source to assess elementary school girls through questioning after looking at today’s popular magazines. The Center found that 67% of the girls felt a sense of body dissatisfaction and 47% wanted to diet after looking at the magazines.

The presentation also recognized that young girls are more afraid of being fat than they are of nuclear war, cancer or losing their parents.

While societal standards are a common push for women to develop disordered eating, factors such concerning psychological, interpersonal and biological issues play a role as well.

According to York, the common line between these disorders is “an overvalue of weight as a basis for self-esteem.”

At The Renfrew Center, they treat a spectrum of eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and binge eating. The patients, including dancers, will connect with staff and fellow patients to share thoughts and feelings.

Their treatment options include psychotherapy, support or self-help groups, medical treatment at the residential level of care, nutritional treatment from a dietician, medication, or if needed, hospitalization.

The presentation provided key signs to identify an eating disorder in a friend and the steps necessary to take to help them recover. Some strategies the dancers were told to practice when trying to help a friend with a disorder were to recognize the disorder as a potentially fatal disease and help them find treatment, listen to that friend with respect, suggest they seek help, be available to them, talk about things unrelated to weight like feelings, and share their own struggles.

“The demand on a dancer’s body and image is quite high so they need to be physically and mentally conditioned to do the work,” Lemonius said.

Yet not all dancers who are losing a significant amount of weight are experiencing a disease. At The Renfrew Center, they have an intake process that determines the need and appropriate level of care for each patient. They analyze daily habits of a patient; how much they’re eating or exercising to prove if someone might have an existing predisposition to losing weight easily or simply has a naturally smaller frame.

While this was the first step of its kind in the dance department, Lemonius does plan to follow through with more support in order to continue to empower the dancers.

While there is a nutrition course available to some dancers, he plans on bringing in a nutritionist in the coming semesters to pair with the idea of staying healthy and knowing reliable resources to turn to.