Ausdancersoverseas

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Ausdancersoverseas

Ex-dancer, now registered doctor and sports nutritionist, researcher with special focus on eating disorders and low energy availability in dance

31/07/2026

What I said to dancers this week.

A conversation that keeps repeating itself.

Not because dancers don’t know enough about nutrition, but because humans are often trying to solve psychological problems with nutrition advice.
The dance world still has an uncomfortable contradiction: It frequently rewards a childlike physique while expecting the judgement, emotional regulation and resilience of an adult woman (to a certain degree - submission and obedience are a whole other topic). Those two expectations don’t coexist. And so, when life feels overwhelming, food often becomes the thing that looks like the problem. In reality, it may simply be the one strategy someone found to cope with uncertainty, fear, perfectionism, or a world that never encouraged genuine autonomy.

This is why meal plans in isolation so often fail. They promise everything and deliver not even a fraction of those promises. Recovery isn’t just about eating or eating more. It’s about developing the skills that make eating feel safe in the first place: tolerating uncertainty, setting boundaries, making independent decisions, regulating emotions, and discovering that your worth isn’t earned through control.

If we want healthier dancers, we have to stop treating food as though it exists in isolation.

It’s rarely just about food.

20/07/2026

Victoria Beckham at the World Cup is so many of us working in dance medicine. Every couple of months, the dance world seems to discover a new villain, a new miracle nutrient, or a new ‘secret’ to the perfect ballet body.
Meanwhile, the questions that actually matter rarely change.
- Is the dancer fueling enough?
- Can they recover?
- Are they healthy, physically as well as mentally?
- Can they perform - not just today, but five years from now?

Sometimes the qualities that are admired the most - discipline, control, commitment, ‘clean eating’, the ability to push through pain - can also be signs that a dancer is struggling.

Here’s the inconvenient truth:
The biggest performance gains rarely come from the latest trend.
They come from getting the boring basics right, day after day:
🥣 Eating enough.
🍞 Making carbohydrates the foundation; not protein.
💧 Hydrating properly, including replacing sodium.
😴 Prioritising sleep.
🏋️ Recovering as intentionally as you train.
🌿 Having a life outside of dance.
❤️ Listening to your body, not fighting it.

The challenge isn’t finding the next trend.
It’s learning to tell the difference between high performance and high risk.
Because physiology doesn’t care what’s trending.

👇 Which slide made you stop and think?

16/07/2026

**Train according to your cycle.**
It sounds scientific.
It has colourful graphics.
It has hormone diagrams.
It has millions of views.

But does it have any evidence?
Two major new publications asked exactly that question. The answer is far more nuanced than social media would have you believe. This isn’t an argument against female physiology. It’s an argument for understanding it properly.
Hormones matter. Symptoms matter. Individual differences matter.
But if your goal is building strength and muscle, the biggest drivers are still remarkably familiar: progressive overload, adequate energy availability, recovery and consistency.

In dance, we should also ask a more fundamental question before debating whether squats belong on Day 12 or Day 22: Does the dancer have a healthy, ovulatory cycle at all? Because no amount of cycle syncing will compensate for low energy availability.

The science has moved on.
Maybe our advice should too.

👇 What has social media told you about training around your cycle?

07/07/2026

Watching the sporting world debate whether a decision should have been overturned reminded me of this:
Dance has been living with a long list of ‘decisions’ that were actually never rules - just traditions that somehow became untouchable.
Those deserve a red card. 🚩

01/06/2026

One of the most damaging beliefs I encounter in clinical practice is the idea that artistic employability and physiological health are the same thing.
They are not.
A dancer can be highly employable and physiologically quite unwell.
A dancer can be physiologically healthy and considered ‘unemployable’ in a particular artistic environment (which says everything you need to know about the environment).
Contracts are not blood tests. Casting decisions are not hormone panels. And promotions are not DXA scans.

If we want to call it a problem, then the problem is that biology does not care whether you got the role (the actual problem still being the dance world though). Your hormones do not know whether you got a contract. Your bones do not know whether you got promoted. And your hypothalamus was not consulted during casting.
Biology keeps asking the same questions:
Did you eat enough?
Did you recover enough?
Do you have enough energy available to support normal physiological function?
A contract is not proof of health. And a rejection is not proof of illness.
Unfortunately, physiology and biology remain stubbornly irrelevant in artistic opinions.

21/05/2026

is now PMOS.
And no, this is not just medicine changing words for fun. The new terminology (Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome) reflects something many clinicians, researchers and patients have known for a long time: this condition was never simply ‘about ovaries.’

The old name quietly shaped:
▪️what clinicians looked for
▪️what patients believed was ‘wrong’
▪️what got dismissed
▪️and what became associated with shame.

The problem?
PCOS was often reduced to:
🚩fertility
🚩weight
🚩ultrasound appearances
🚩or simplistic stereotypes about ‘hormonal women.’

But physiology is rarely that neat.
PMOS acknowledges the condition as fundamentally multisystemic - involving endocrine regulation, metabolism, inflammation, reproductive health, psychological wellbeing and more.

And in dance medicine specifically, this matters enormously: because many dancers sit in clinically messy spaces that don’t fit textbook binaries. Think of these potential combinations/clinical presentations:
▪️restrictive eating and insulin resistance
▪️underfueling and hyperandrogenism
▪️REDs and polycystic ovarian morphology
▪️menstrual dysfunction that isn’t classic FHA
▪️body changes interpreted morally instead of physiologically

This is also why we need to stop treating bodies like moral projects.
Lean ≠ healthy.
Weight gain ≠ failure.
Hormones ≠ personality traits.

The PMOS discussion is ultimately part of a much bigger shift in medicine:
away from simplistic organ-based labels,
towards systems thinking.

And that may be the most important part of this conversation at all!!

PMOS

19/05/2026

How did we get from the Female Athlete Triad…
to REDs… to overtraining syndrome… to allostatic load?
And why are an increasing number of clinicians and researchers beginning to question parts of the REDs framework? Not because they deny the harm of chronic underfueling, but because human physiology is rarely monocausal, linear, or simple?

This post and essay (linked) explore the evolution of these frameworks, the debate surrounding causality and specificity, the Bradford Hill criteria, overlapping symptom presentations, and the clinical tension between useful models and oversimplification.

Because in healthcare - and most definitely in dance medicine - we are constantly asked to make high-stakes decisions using incomplete, evolving, and imperfect data.

Fatigue, injuries, hormonal disruption, gastrointestinal symptoms, altered biomarkers, autonomic dysfunction, mood changes, impaired recovery: real symptoms, real suffering, but often multiple possible pathways.

The question is not (and cannot be) whether athletes and dancers are struggling. The question must be how we reason carefully enough not to reduce complex humans to overly tidy explanations.

The full longform essay + pencil sketch series is now live.

Link in bio.

21/04/2026

A contract is supposed to be the end goal. Proof that ‘you’ve made it’.
But contracts don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist inside systems - with norms, pressures, and consequences. And if those systems include underfueling, injury, psychological strain, and are overall relentless, then staying isn’t automatically ‘the best/better’ option. It’s often just the more familiar one - because familiar feels safe.

The problem is, the human brain doesn’t rank options by ‘objectively best possible life’. It ranks them by perceived safety. And once something is coded as ‘this is how I survive (read: ‘best’)’, walking away doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like a risk.

Survival is not the same as ‘the best you’ll ever have.’
But in a relentless system, the Brian often stops knowing the difference.

That’s the level the conversation needs to reach; otherwise we keep mistaking survival patterns for informed choice.

Full blog post: link in bio.

10/04/2026

Undernutrition is recognized globally as a medical and humanitarian concern.

In some performance contexts, it is reframed as discipline.
When tickets can be sold, it is labeled excellence.

I am not okay with the state of the world, and definitely not with the state of the ballet world.

Here’s what the Chalamet debate missed: Link in bio

12/03/2026

Dancers train like elite athletes. But their sleep schedules often look like this:
- late rehearsals
- late performances
- early class
Sleep quietly disappears from the timetable. And with it: recovery, learning, immune function, and injury resilience.
Sleep isn’t a luxury. It’s part of performance.

Full breakdown (= longer blog post): link in bio

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