Dance changed how I eat — for the better this time

Lately, I’ve noticed that whenever I leave for the dance studio, I pack two bags. One is familiar and increasingly specific: a good leotard, fleece-lined tights, an extra water bottle, Band-Aids for blisters, putty-colored flats for barre, a pair of low, strappy heels for salsa. The other is empty, which is the point.

A few nights a week, I exit class sweaty and ravenous and walk straight for a grocery store to fill it.

I’ve come to love the rhythm of it: exertion followed by provision, movement followed by dinner. It feels faintly pastoral — hunting and gathering — translated into an urban evening, conducted in sneakers and leggings under fluorescent lights.

It’s now simple routine, but that overlap of food and dance isn’t something I ever would have predicted.

I have one of those familiar dancer stories. I spent more than a decade in studios, realized I wasn’t going to be one of the talented few who make a living at it and drifted toward other work, carrying along the kind of disordered eating that often tags along for the ride. When I look back at my teenage years, I remember real joy: the day I got my first pointe shoes; being dipped low while waltzing in a cerulean, beaded ballroom dress; winning a trophy in a midriff-baring tiger-print number you couldn’t pay me to put on now. I loved to jump. I loved airtime. An instructor once joked we should choreograph a routine where my feet never touched the ground.

I also remember being hungry. Not the pleasant hunger that follows exertion, but a hollowed-out, ambient kind, so constant it felt almost procedural. When an instructor suggested my body didn’t “indicate to judges that I was serious about the craft,” I took the note. Inspired by weekly episodes of “The Biggest Loser,” I spent two weeks walking for hours on a treadmill in my parents’ basement, under a Larry Bird poster my dad had tacked above a rack of free weights. Alongside a steady diet of cottage cheese and salsa, the weight came off relatively quickly.

“Have you been sick?” my instructor asked the next time we met, his voice softer than usual. I said I’d been working out. His tone shifted. He beamed. “You look good.”

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I missed dancing. I did not miss that.

But something shifted in February of this year.

It wasn’t a body thing, exactly, though this was a year very much saturated with chatter about GLP-1s, “thinspo,” a term I hadn’t thought about since my Tumblr days, and its sharper, more judgmental daughter, “skinnytok.” No, it was something a little more elemental.

Inspired by books like “Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning” and “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again” (I was clearly constructing a personal curriculum here, which, in retrospect, deserves its own syllabus) I had decided this would be a year of deliberately being bad at things. The kind of intentional fumbling that leaves you feeling both exposed and alive.

I was wandering one of my favorite local markets — a European specialty shop with German-Italian flair, excellent deli salads and an impeccable display case of sausages — when I noticed that the studio was offering beginner adult ballet and barre classes, including a free trial.

And yes, I felt like a beginner. Reacquainting myself with the way an arm extends from the shoulder, the way the back can stretch into a gentle crescent and, let’s be honest, the fact that my hips now prefer first position with a grinding protest. I expected frustration in that yawning gap between memory and present ability, but instead, it was exhilarating.

I liked the space, the even-keeled instructor in her 60s, the other women — everyone over 25, a smorgasbord of body types — and the fact that I left class soaked in sweat, trembling and oddly triumphant. I signed up for the “semester.”

By spring, I was feeling stronger than I had in years (though the 90-second mid-class plank still eludes me). And, frankly, a little hot. A little flirty. I scanned the map of nearby studios and, to my excitement, found one that offered salsa, another dance form I had missed terribly, only 15 minutes away.

I fell into the same rhythm: starting over, drenched in sweat, sheer exhilaration, “sign me up.” The body remembers pleasure as quickly as it forgets skill. And it was there, slipping off my shoes and dropping them into my dance bag, that the thought arrived in full, undeniable force: I’m starving.

Next to the salsa studio sits a tiny specialty market — a “shoppy-shop,” in internet parlance — about the size of my apartment galley kitchen, packed with ingredients that make me want to stage a miniature dinner party, even if only for two. Tremendous loaves of parchment-wrapped sourdough dangled from hanging wicker baskets; specialty pastas and sauces lined the shelves; tinned octopus and sardines winked at me from the corner; and a mini-refrigerated case displayed cheeses, sausages and pristine hand-wrapped onigiri.

Stomach gnawing and hands slightly shaky, I loaded up on ephemera for fancy paninis, held together with swipes of giardiniera mayo, and splurged on some pastel-hued botanical sodas for drinking straight from the can. It was late, and the store was out of disposable bags, so I tucked some of the loot into my dance bag and cradled the rest in the crook of my arm. “You’d better bring another bag next time,” the cashier quipped. Not a bad idea, I thought.

And thus began the two-bag habit.

On ballet nights, I wander to the studio, then to the market with its staggering sausage display, usually emerging with a tub of hearty, fresh-made soup, another deli tub of some vinegary salad or slaw and a gloriously dumb hunk of bread. On salsa nights, it’s the shoppy-shop, where my most recent indulgence was a jar of vodka sauce so good it almost felt luxurious to simply carry it home.

And let’s be clear: I know the two-bag habit is not some masterful triumph. I am a realist (though if you’d seen me juggle those groceries and my dance bag, you might have questioned my definition of “grace”). But for anyone who’s tangled with an eating disorder — and the way its tendrils quietly siphon joy from even the simplest routines — it is something. While the dominant culture seems, yet again, obsessed with appetite suppression, I am rediscovering appetite: earned appetite, physical appetite, the kind that shows up after exertion and politely demands to be honored.

Dance and food used to feel incompatible in my life; now they feel braided together, a quiet symphony of movement and nourishment. A gift, really, to begin the year with.

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