The 3 Essential Components for

Peak Dance Performance

There’s a reason my nutrition philosophy is called Fuel the Fierceness. It’s not just about fat loss. It’s about fueling your body to support your art (aka - be a better dancer!). This requires 3 essential components for us as dancers. When we approach our diet, it might sound silly, but we don’t have the luxury of just focusing on getting lean. We also have to be concerned with having enough power, energy, and vitality to actually dance…and we have to engage in enough passion and pleasure to develop our artistry.

If we just get caught up in dieting down and restricting calories to lose body fat, our performance and artistry will suffer. Even if you get the ballerina body you want, it’s not going to make you a better dancer if you have no fire power to perform and no excitement to inspire your artistry. Trust me; I made this mistake for many years before finally changing my approach to eating. Once I discovered the different foods that support these 3 components of peak dance performance, everything changed.

The number one thing we probably search for in a diet is fat loss and control over our body aesthetics. Even though the dance world is making improvements on this front, we still hold ourselves to the rail-thin, frail looking aesthetics that we associate with the “ideal ballerina.” It’s a challenge for many of us to make peace with our bodies feeling the constant pressure to be leaner (even if that pressure is only coming from our own mental demons). But, as athletes & artists, it’s not enough to hold ourselves to a super strict diet in order to get “skinny.” Yes, it is important that we optimize our body aesthetics. But, if we sacrifice our health and power for this single purpose, we actually will get further from our dance goals. We also need to be able to perform at an elite level – controlling and manipulating our bodies in ways the "normals" can't begin to wrap their heads around (one of the reasons our audience is so drawn to ballet).

It's also not enough for us dancers to be super strict with our nutrition in an effort to max out our athletic performance ability. A strict sports training approach that dials in the nutrition needs of athletes in order to allow them to perform at the highest levels in their sport sounds like it would be great for dancers. After all, we are elite athletes. But, this approach neglects the fact that we are artists as well. If we get too restrictive and regimented in our nutrition (considering most dancers are already too rigid and strict in their training), we suck all the passion out and lose our inspiration in life – the fire that fuels our artistry.

There's this third component that is absolutely necessary to our dance success (not to mention our happiness!) but often overlooked - pleasure! We are so quick to be restrictive and disciplined with ourselves in order to get ahead in our ballet that we end up squeezing the juiciness right out of life and our art. Whether it comes from food, relationships, hobbies, environments, experiences, or friends, we need regular doses of pleasure to fuel our artistry. That's the stuff creativity and inspiration come from. Otherwise, our dancing turns into mechanical movement and tricks...instead of real art with the ability to touch and make a difference in the world.

We can enhance all three of these components with our diet...but the dilemma is that we can't optimize all three at once. We need a plan that allows us to focus on one at a time, depending on our immediate goals - aesthetics, athletics, or artistry.

That's what my newly updated FAT LOSS GAME PLAN guides you through. It's a blueprint that teaches you which foods to eat to give you the desired effects for each of these three components. This knowledge is priceless and so necessary for healing your relationship with food and your body. Instead of food being an enemy that makes you fat...it becomes a tool that gives you control over your body.

Your peak performance state requires all three of these components to be nourished. Rather than seeing your diet as something restrictive to cut weight, learn how to use food to optimize your aesthetics, athletics, and artistry.

If you already bought this program in the past, you get this new update for FREE! Simply log in to your online program, and the new Fuel the Fierceness version is already loaded in the system. If you don’t have a login (some early versions came as a PDF attached to an email), contact me, and I’ll send you the new login as soon as possible! If you have my PHOTO SHOOT PREP program, this newly updated Fuel the Fierceness will be loaded in that program as well!

This new version has almost twice as much information, and I want to make sure you have all these tools to help you stay on your path towards your peak performance state!

Photo credit: Steve Vaccariello