here is evidence to suggest ballet dancers are particularly prone to developing anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Ballet teachers ask dancers to keep weight levels that are abnormal.

A Sydney ballet teacher says she guards against the problem with her students because of her own experience as a ballet student. She was given amphetamines and developed bulimia like three others in her class; and another two had anorexia.

There is a long tradition of these destructive requirements. Gelsey Kirkland, one of ballet guru George Balanchine’s students, recalls in her autobiography, Dancing on My Grave, her teacher, the ‘great’ Balanchine said of her body, ‘Must see the bones’. “I was less than 100 pounds even then,” she wrote. “He did not merely say, ‘Eat less’. He said, ‘Eat nothing!’”