Competing With The Sylph

It's been many years since I first read this book, but I thought it was excellent. As another reviewer pointed out, the roots of eating disorders aren't explored (though for dancers, it seems to me fairly obvious why they're looking to be ever smaller - just to make themselves more employable in a hypercompetitive market where every physical flaw is picked over relentlessly by teachers and by other dancers). But told as it was from the physician's standpoint, the book gave me a lot of knowledge about the physical repercussions of dancers' (especially young female dancers') attempts to become as weightless as possible. I remember a dancer in the book taking about a relative's laxative abuse (the relative was also a dancer, I believe). The woman eventually had to wear a colostomy bag, and as the dancer told the story put it, "And you can't dance with THAT!" It's worth reading.

From the medical perspective, this book is an excellent review of the biological problems dancers encounter in response to the rigors they subject themselves in the pursiut of the ideal dance body. Because the author is in the medical profession, this book is written primarily from the medical stand point, which fails to examine the dancer from a holistic perspective, includng mind, spirit, and body. Therefore, it is lacking in psychological analysis of why dancers are so consumed with images of the ideal body. The author neglects to make the mind-body connection and take his analysis one step further to get answers to the questions of why dancers will risk their body and health, the very thing they need the most in order to pursue their career, to achieve the ideal extreme thinness.