Hi dancers! My name is Jess Spinner, I am a former professional ballet dancer and now a health, nutrition, and lifestyle coach for aspiring and professional dancers. I work with dancers through my platform, The Whole Dancer. And I am thrilled to be a part of MILKFEVER DANCE as your health, nutrition, and wellness support person.
So, today, I wanted to share just a little bit about myself, my journey, my story, and what I do to help dancers now and it’s useful I think to get an idea of where all the influences come from where somebody got from point A to point B to now I think I’m at probably point G or F maybe. But further down the line it’s always useful to know what someone’s journey and transitions and experiences were.

So my dance journey started young, I was three, I started in one of those combination Dolly Dinkle studios here in the States. I’m from New York originally and we would do combination classes with ballet, tap, and jazz, and loved it. I loved to dance, I loved costumes, I loved being on stage, I really loved the performing elements of it a lot. It was a big draw for me and I stayed in the same studio until I was about twelve and at that point my teacher said to me, “I think you should go somewhere more professional for more intensive training.”

She knew I loved ballet specifically so she encouraged me to go somewhere where they would prioritize the ballet, where I would get the technique that I needed, so I ended up at a studio that was more professional track. Many of the dancers there did have aspirations to be professional dancers or to go to dancing college and just to pursue it beyond high school so that was a good fit for me at the time. I stayed there throughout high school and after high school I ended up at Butler University where I studied dance and art administration.

After Butler I danced in Louisville with the Louisville Ballet, after Louisville I moved to Boston and freelanced in the Boston area for a number of years before my career ended due to injury partly, and also partly just not taking care of my mental wellbeing, struggling with my relationship to food and my body over the duration of my dance journey and just kind of being burnt out and needing to stop. It was, it was a need at that point.

When I was fourteen, still at my pre professional studio in high school, I went away to my first summer intensive. I went to the Kirov Academy and I made three fast friends, like we spent all of our time together and we ate all of our meals together, we’re in the same level so we just really enjoyed this close friendship that built in a very quick time. And that’s one of my favorite things to talk to my young dancer clients about, summer intensives, you know you can build great friendships and let the goal just be to have fun and to enjoy the dancing, and make friends, and so over the course of that time because I was eating differently—it was my first time eating away from home—I gained weight and when I got back to my home studio my ballet teacher tapped me on the thigh and said that wasn’t there before. And this was a crushing moment in my life, and one that I will never forget, and now I’ve talked about it a lot over the course of my time since creating The Whole Dancer back in 2015. I have shared that story many, many times because I think it is true for a lot of dancers that there might be an incident like that, that has this huge impact on you and you take it with you through your whole dance journey. It’s also true that for some dancers they don’t have a specific experience like that but just the influence of dance culture can have a negative impact on their mental wellbeing their ability to cope with challenging situations, their ability to maintain a balanced relationship to food and their bodies over the course of their dance pursuits.

So after that happened, I went on my first diet. I decided to have a very low amount of fat, of dietary fat, over the course of the day, at each meal, this was coming off of, I was born in the 80s, in 1985, so this is in the low fat era of dieting so there was a lot of low fat food around that my mother already bought, a lot of low fat stuff. So I decided I should go on a low fat diet and crash dieting became a huge element and aspect of my journey.

I dieted for the duration of my career, the whole time I was dancing from the time I was fourteen till about twenty-seven, and it was just persistent and it was a lot of going up and down in weight. And my weight fluctuated significantly over the course of that time. I tried to be restrictive in various ways. My restriction was in fact what led me to plant-based eating plans and that is part of why I encouraged dancers to, rather than needing to put yourself in some food label, to commit to following what your body is telling you in terms of cues, to yes, acknowledge any ethical motivation behind food choices, but to be really honest with yourself if there’s ever shifts or changes that you’re making that are perhaps driven by a desire to be restrictive. Because that was what led me personally to veganism and I know that it’s true for other dancers as well.

Sso with this dance struggle, with this body image and food struggle over the course of my whole career, it had a huge impact on my confidence and body image both were— confidence was relatively non-existent, body image was extremely negative every single day. I was critical of what I saw in the mirror and what happens when we go down that path, and I see this with dancers all the time, is that then your body becomes the focus and your body becomes a huge distraction. I was not focused on improving technically. I would try things, I would do things, but the pervasive thinking was that my body just needs to be different and then I’ll be a successful dancer. The reality is if you work with your body, if you do the work to become friends with your body, which is your greatest tool and instrument and arguably one of the greatest gifts of our lives, when you can become friends with and collaborator with your body, that’s when you’ll do your best dancing. That’s when you’ll be able to progress and move forward as a dancer at the fastest rate, at the, you know most rapid climb, to your goals and successes. So that’s something I would just encourage you all to take on and support to your own body, and prioritizing your own wellbeing.

Because I struggled when I got towards the end of my dance journey, I was injured, I had a lot of injuries, a lot of stress fractures and things like that, which are most often connected to under fueling or not adequately fueling, and I really never was doing that. My food consumption was fluctuating significantly. I would undereat as much as I could, but then I would revert and reverse that and binge eat or overeat and so there was a lot of this back and forth and it’s not healthy for your body and I wasn’t getting everything I needed nutritionally and so I had a lot of stress fractures. I had a lot of injury over the course of time when I got towards the end of my career. I had been in a boot for like six months and then I was trying to get back into it and I was taking class every day but struggling and still in pain and still struggling with food and still challenged by body image and I started doing some auditions for freelance work in New York.

I was back with my family at home and it was just such a struggle. I wasn’t getting any jobs and I was so stuck in comparison so I assumed that all the dancers around me had an easy time with all of these things, and they had no struggles with food or their bodies, and they had just figured it out and I couldn’t. It felt so isolating, and that experience, my whole dance experience, is the main motivation for why I started The Whole Dancer.

And now backing up slightly, or fast forwarding slightly, before I started The Whole Dancer, I started to transition out of dance. Like I said, it was injury, it was mental challenge and struggle that I had been in for such a long time, and it was sort of just being burned out and not feeling like I could fight the fight, to try and get back into it anymore. that I started to transition away from dance. And in my dancing years, when I was still dancing, I started working at Whole Foods as their first healthy eating specialist, one of their first healthy eating specialists, and they put all of us through a plant-based nutrition—nutritarian program, and this is from Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and this is an extreme, nutrient-dense, focused eating plan that is actually quite restrictive. But at the time that really spoke to me and I connected with that, and said yes, this is validating, we should just be eating nutrient-dense plant foods all the time.

Aand I think there’s some value to what I learned there, and I engaged with a lot of information about benefits of plant-based eating for our health and for the planet and all of that, and some of it I do still take with me, but it’s not the primary focus for my health coaching now.

After that program, which I did back in 2009, in 2013 I went through the institute for integrative nutrition, which is a much more holistic approach, which also recognizes a concept called bioindividuality, which is that we are each unique. No two of us are exactly the same. Maybe if you’re an identical twin, genetically the same, but there’s differences with each of us and even in those cases there are life experiences that are going to be different, which does have an impact on your body and how you’re relating to food and all of that. So bioindividuality says that we can’t have one perfect eating plan for everyone, and this is a trap that everyone—many people—fall into at any given time, is that, “Oh my friend was eating this way and she achieved this goal so I should try it too, because that’s what I want to achieve.”

The reality is, we can follow the same plan as somebody else and have completely different results, and that was one of, that is, something that I really want to take with me, is that all the work I do with dancers and non-dancers, like it is that finding your path with food is completely unique to you and it doesn’t matter what works for someone else. You have to make the goal to discover what is best for you and to be, again, really honest with yourself about what’s working for you what’s fueling you, what’s giving you energy, whether you’re eating enough, knowing that sufficient fuel is a key element in doing your best dancing. And in fact many dancers are underfueling. So know that you have to get, become really honest with yourself about how you’re going to achieve your fueling goals, how you’re going to give your body enough of what it needs, and then finding this balance with food.

Later on I went through the precision nutrition, nutrition coaching program which has more of a sports performance focus, so it talks about, you know, nutrient timing and things like that so that’s quite relevant to dancers and your goals and again tailoring a plan to yourself that can fuel your best dancing. One thing that’s a little different than the work that I do, is it is about you figuring this out as I support you on the journey and I have plenty of information to share with you on the journey, but it is a lot of your own motivations and your own experimentation and your own adjustments to food, guided by me, that are going to allow you to discover for yourself what is going to fit you best.
And part of the benefit to this approach is that since you’re leading, it’s much easier to maintain the changes that we make, because it’s not all directed by me, because it is something that you are listening to your intuition and your body and mind and putting it all together to create a plan that works best for you.

And it also goes beyond food. This is where, you know, lifestyle coaching is something that I do because your life, your sleep, your relationships, any work that you’re doing outside of dance, any non-dance experiences, are all a part of it and are all a part of finding true balance. They’re all a part of feeling your most confident and so we talk about all those things to make sure that you have an approach to dance in life that feels sustainable, that feels healthy, that’s joyful and all of those good things. I try to be, for dancers now, who I needed when I was dancing, and you know one of the things that I sort of went through when I was deciding if I was going to start working with dancers, was I reached out to so many dancers who I had danced with, or friends of dancers that I had danced with, and I said to them, you know, “What was your experience with these things? Did you feel fully confident in your body? Did you feel really confident in your approach to food? Did you feel yourself adequately and easily?”

And the overwhelming response was that dancers were struggling with these things, more so than the general population, because of the body and aesthetic pressure that you feel from day to day and you know it is such a psychological and mental thing which is why my most recent coursework has been in emotional eating psychology. Because that’s a huge element in our relationship to food. Our emotional relationship to food and emotional relationship to our bodies has a huge impact on the foods we choose and the foods you gravitate towards. And when we feel balanced with food choices, or when we are left craving more, or something different.

And so that’s all a part of it. The Whole Dancer. I started in 2015 and something that seemed incredibly special to me, it has evolved over time, but I am consistently supporting dancers one on one or through online courses because I know how much it can change the trajectory of your dance journey when you have that sort of support. You know, it really can make or break careers if you’re in this place of struggle.

I feel that my own journey could have looked incredibly different. I could have reached a much higher level, if I had been in a good place with all of these things and so I can’t go back and change my own past, which is part of why I do the work that I do to help dancers shift their own paths. When you are supported outside of the studio, when you have a level and mindful and happy approach to food, it’s when you are able to reach body neutrality or even body positivity and self-love, these things all bolster your dancing. They make you a better dancer. They will allow you to be happier, they will allow you to achieve more, and I think sometimes dancers get caught up in this narrative that in order to achieve a dance goal I just have to spend more time dancing, I have to spend more money on dancing, I have to go to more intensives, I have to, you know, work with more higher level, better known teachers and that can help, but not if everything else is out of whack and not in a good place or you’re not supported.

I have seen dancers go from you know pre pro to professional in high level companies or from starting out in a company to thriving in a company by doing this work for themselves with me or with another health coach. I have seen that shift. I’ve seen what’s possible and that’s why I do encourage you all to consider what the investment in yourself can do, what this self-growth path can do for you and that’s what I try to help dancers with and I work with dancers in a number of different transitions. A lot of the time I work with a lot of dancers who are transitioning to a pre professional program. I work with a lot of dancers who are transitioning to college dance programs, or out of college dance programs into auditions, and then first company jobs or just from pre pro to company. Those are, that’s another transition that I often will help with. It is even something that I help dancers to transition from professional to retired dancer.

Because sometimes they feel OK in that space of, you know, this is my very busy schedule, this is how I fit food into it, and then because so many dancers struggle when they have layoffs or when they have time off from dance, but then the prospect of not dancing and having to manage food for yourself after you’re done dancing professionally is another time when dancers might reach out for support.

Like I said at the beginning of this, I am so thrilled to be a part of MILKFEVER DANCE to share with you all a balanced approach to your bodies and nutrition and wellness, to give you all a holistic view of these things and to support you in achieving all that you can as a dancer by giving your mind and body the support that it needs and deserves. So don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Come over to The Whole Dancer and check things out there. You can visit us online at thewholedancer.com or you could always send me an email, jess@thewholedancer.com.

Thank you to MILKFEVER for having me, and thank you all for checking out this video and hearing a bit about my story and background. Can’t wait to connect more!