Eleena Melamed can attest to that reality. Her trouble began when she was 12 - the first time her teachers at the prestigious School of America Ballet (SAB) told her to lose weight.
"They had always told me I had the perfect body," she says. "I wasn't heavy, I was just starting to develop. It was devastating." At the time,
she thought starvation was the only way to get her teachers to like her - and the scary thing is, it seemed to work.
"I became severely anorexic," she says, sitting on a sofa in her New York City apartment. "You know those little boxes of cereal? I would eat half a box of bran flakes for breakfast, the other half for lunch - no milk - and an apple or a cup of broccoli for dinner."
She moved into the SAB dorms at fifteen, a decision she now terms the worst she ever made. "Everybody there was obsessed with food," she says.
"It was crazy. I wasn't eating and I got extremely depressed, but I was very successful. When I was thin, all the teachers were drooling over me."
Everything changed for Eleena was sixteen and her grandfather died during Christmas vacation. Away from SAB, she began - the horror! - to eat again. "When I went on vacation, I weighed 95," she says. "when I went back to the school, I weighed 116. But for someone who is five-foot-six, that is not a lot."
After a brief stint abroad, she moved back to New York,
where she was rejected by NYCB
but eventually offered a contract at American Ballet Theatre. After two months, the horrible cycle started again.
