Ballet Beautiful: Transform Your Body and Gain the Strength, Grace and Focus of a Ballet Dancer (33 page)
Authors: Mary Helen Bowers
d
Bend the standing knee again into a plié, bending your top arm back to third position and leaving your other arm in second position at your side. Stretch the standing leg, keeping your back leg in arabesque. Don’t arch your back or drop your chest.
e
Repeat.
8 counts, 4 sets.
Stretch
:
Standing Stretch for Arms and Legs.
If you have extra time, join me on the mat for a Hip Opener and Inner Thigh Stretch.
Change sides and repeat all the movements of the Arabesque Workout except the first one.
These 15-minute Blasts are yours to play with—you can combine them with each other, replace segments in the Classic workout, or do them singly or together.
When you have time to do all four Blasts together, you will get an incredible full-body workout. If you have only 30 minutes to work out, consider the following combinations:
•
Cardio Series Body Blast and Swan Arms: A full-body workout with a focus on the arms
•
Swan Arms and the Plié Workout, or Swan Arms with the Arabesque Workout: An intense workout for the arms and legs
•
Plié Workout combined with the Arabesque Workout: Incredible leg and butt workout that will get your heart rate up
If you want to thank yourself for a good workout, make sure to do a reverence (see the end of the previous chapter). This is also a nice stretch and a fun way to end a workout!
Always remember to stretch and drink water, and equally important—have fun and enjoy your amazing results!
THE BALLET BEAUTIFUL LIFESTYLE
The secret to any successful eating plan is satisfaction—not deprivation.
I
have a friend who once said to me, “In the time that I wasted thinking about calories, I could have learned Japanese!” She’s right. So many of us let calories drive us crazy. We obsess over this or that food—and I bet you know as well as I do that all that comes of obsessing over calories and dieting are misery and weight gain. Food is a necessary part of life, and it’s one that we can all learn to embrace and enjoy! And just as with exercise, finding the right balance with nutrition is a wonderful way to enhance your health, nourish your body, and improve the way you look and feel.
You may have heard about ballerinas’ crazy diets—grapefruits, cigarettes, and coffee—but you won’t find any of those unhealthy extremes here! To perform at your best, whether it’s as a professional ballerina, a mom, a businesswoman, an artist, or even a student, you have to nourish and feed your body—and your brain!
In the ballet world, just as in the regular world, women are socialized at a young age to restrict what they eat. There can be pressure to maintain a certain body image, and this emphasis can unwittingly trigger a dangerous, self-denying cycle of bingeing on the wrong foods and thinking of the right foods as off-limits and less than fulfilling. I remember being shocked when I arrived at the School of American Ballet, the official
school of the New York City Ballet, and all of the girls were eating frozen yogurt with sprinkles for lunch. (This was the ’90s! Fro-yo was all the rage.) I tried it once and was left starving; I had no energy for my afternoon variations class and couldn’t concentrate in my lessons at school. Without the protein, fiber, and grains I was used to, my body couldn’t function and I was underperforming. I quickly went back to my go-to lunch, a whole-wheat turkey sandwich and fresh fruit.
This chapter is all about rediscovering your natural relationship with eating—yes, it’s true and possible! The Ballet Beautiful lifestyle is utterly “anti-diet,” and I am convinced that that is why it works! You will see how safe, simple, and easy it is to stop using food as a tool for self-destruction or as a way to pass the time when you are bored.
As Katherine told me, “The key thing that I have learned from Ballet Beautiful is that nothing has to be all one way or another. Ballet Beautiful has helped me get away from the extremes of dieting that I think so many of us have struggled with. I learned to make simple substitutions that go a long way in how I look and feel. These have completely changed my life!”
Jenna’s shift in how she thinks about food and nutrition was more subtle: “I was already eating healthfully, but now I’m more aware. I’m not obsessive but aware. I might think twice before eating a cheeseburger, and I am definitely eating healthier snacks—like nuts and fruit—throughout the day.”
The word
diet
has a negative association for many of us—it can bring up feelings of failure, anger, and resentment from the past. I feel grouchy and depressed just contemplating the word because that’s how dieting made me feel—deprived, food-obsessed, and out of sorts! Ballet Beautiful is a lifestyle, not a diet—and the information in this chapter will help you achieve and maintain a healthy, deprivation-free way of eating that perfectly complements the other parts of the program. It is truly possible to shift the way you think about food, learn to trust yourself to make healthy choices
most
of the time, and reset your natural relationship with food!
I am grateful to have learned that dieting is not only unnecessary but counterproductive to health and weight loss goals. The extreme measures that allow many of even
the most popular diets to take the pounds off fast make failure inevitable because they are not sustainable over a period of time. The roller coaster up and down on the scale from extreme dieting is incredibly damaging to your psyche, your self-esteem, and your overall health. I’ve been there, and it is rough! But the pattern is also something that can be overcome. So let’s ditch the diet thinking and focus instead on how to achieve and maintain your goals through great nutrition with my Five Easy Eating Principles.
1.
Be prepared
!—I always try to organize my shopping so that I have healthy food available in my refrigerator and pantry at all times. When I am on the road or have a long day of training ahead, I make sure to pack healthy snacks. This idea seems so basic, but a lot of healthy eating plans get derailed because hunger strikes—leading us to overeat or make poor food choices.
2.
Eat often
!—This may sound counterintuitive, but I always tell my clients to eat more! To lose weight and speed up your metabolism, you must feed your body the right foods on a fairly regular basis. The question is, what to eat? I’ll tell you how to cue into your body so you know when it is hungry and the types of foods to eat to keep your metabolism burning all day long.
3.
Substitute for satisfaction
!—I am against any kind of deprivation whatsoever. Rather than restricting calories or denying yourself foods that you love and enjoy, I advocate finding substitutions—healthier options instead of foods that will make you bloated, tired, and cranky. There’s no room for deprivation in Ballet Beautiful.
4.
Be flexible
!—Being flexible is being realistic: not one of us can eat perfectly, work out daily, and keep life from intervening. We work, we have families, vacations, and holidays, and other unexpected events arise and impact us. The key to this principle is staying clear on your goals and relying on strategies that help you adapt your workout and meals to your real life.
5.
Forgive yourself and move on
!—I always tell my clients to forget about yesterday’s mistakes and focus on today. A successful healthy eating plan
provides tips to get back on track when you do slip or overindulge. Not every meal can be a healthy one and that’s okay—the important thing is learning how to quickly get back on track and not let an unhealthy meal or snack unsettle your inner balance and throw you off your program. A cheeseburger and fries for dinner one night does not mean that you’re doomed to eating cheeseburgers and fries at every meal!
Everyone knows that a healthy way of eating is paramount to happiness and the body you want to achieve and inhabit. My Five Easy Eating Principles will help you simplify and streamline how you think about food, teach you how to make healthy food choices, and show you how to maximize and support your new fitness regime. The principles complement the Ballet Beautiful program as a whole because they reflect the same ideals—balance, health, portability, and realistic, attainable goals. Ballet Beautiful will help you whether you want to lose 20 pounds, slim down a size, or maintain a good weight for your body without worrying and obsessing about calories, complicated recipes, or a punishing diet.
This easy-to-follow eating plan is high in nutrition and built around whole, satisfying foods. I designed this balanced program specifically to avoid the inevitable pitfalls and extremes inherent in diets that promise quick weight loss. Your new Ballet Beautiful mindset is a big part of this plan: it will help you set and achieve your weight loss goals—and maintain them for life! You will be able to enjoy your favorite treats without resorting to calorie counting, and you will not be hungry and obsessed with food. The plan easily and fluidly helps you internalize a new balanced lifestyle with a focus on lasting health and happiness.
Together we will focus not on what you
cannot
eat, but rather on what you
can.
You will find easy-to-remember tips on what to put in your shopping cart, as well as recipes for my favorite meals that make this program easy to follow. I won’t make you commit to a long list of forbidden foods. Instead, Ballet Beautiful helps you overcome bad habits and encourages you to focus on the positive, opening doors to incredible possibilities and nutritious food groups while providing you with the keys to making a balanced, healthy, and fit life attainable.
Life is stressful, chaotic, and unpredictable, and one of the best ways to make good nutrition a part of your daily life is to be prepared. For me this means always keeping healthy food in my fridge, in the cupboards at my studio, or in my bag when I’m traveling so that I don’t ever get too hungry. Hunger is one of the first triggers to overeating and making poor food choices. This is true for everyone! No matter how much you know about nutrition, if you are ravenous, it’s hard not only to make the right food choices but to know when to stop.
Though there is no one reason that explains why people overeat or lose their ability to feel full or sated, certain biochemical triggers clearly undermine appetite control. When I get too hungry or go too long without eating, I kick into what I call “starvation mode”: I am literally ravenous, and this is when I feel vulnerable and can lose control. This is exactly when it’s good to reach for a high-protein snack like a boiled egg or Greek yogurt to calm your hunger before you launch into a larger meal.
When our bodies go too long without food, the brain releases chemicals that make us feel hungrier, which in turn make us want to eat. This reaction happens more frequently when we eat foods that are less nutritious, such as starchy carbs, processed foods high in sugar, or fats. But when the body is fed foods that are high in fiber and rich in nutrients, including lean proteins—such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables—the body is fuller longer and responds less drastically to these signals to eat.
Sometimes life gets in the way and you go too long without food by accident. When this happens, I try to help my body by reaching first for proteins and healthy fats before I move into fiber and carbs to keep myself from (1) overeating and (2) feeling sick. This helps to satisfy me without going overboard.
Sound complicated? It’s really not. If you make choices from the Ballet Beautiful healthy whole food lists, you will feel more satisfied, eat more frequently, not crave the sweet stuff, and lose weight. Sound good?