Answers to Paula's questions on my Professional Artefact

After answering the following, I feel much better prepared to carry out my artefact.

How and why will this be effective with your professional audience in mind?

It will be effective because I am trying out different diets, two which are widely deemed unhealthy particularly for dancers. However, as both the literature I reviewed and the inquiry I carried out shows that dancers do not always give their nutrition the attention it needs. I am also guilty of this and so it is something I am really keen to look at further.

Will your film incorporate any other information – it sounds like a type of documentary – like a postscript about what it meant to you.

The video will be a documentary and will have an introduction where I explain what I did and why I did it. Then, each day that I am doing one of the diets I will film regularly and talk about what I have eaten and why. Before I head to the dance class I shall film to explain how I am feeling and then when I get back I shall do the same.

How will you be displaying this –your YouTube channel – who will access it?

I will be displaying this on my YouTube channel and I shall make it public with a title that incorporates dance and nutrition so that if any dancers should be searching online for nutrition they will be able to find my video.

Have you checked it is ok in terms of copyright – is this Challis menu one that is sold (patented) or can anyone try it out (is it from Dance UK?)

Yes, this information is on DanceUK and is therefore intended to be tried out by anyone and I will give her full credit for the recipe on the video. I will only be taking my evening meal from her because I am not doing an intense rehearsal/performance schedule. Breakfast and lunch will be healthy options too but I will using my own knowledge to decide what I am eating for those.

Where is the less healthy diet coming from?

As Challis reports, carbohydrates are the key to having energy as a dancer. I will miss that food group out as much as possible and eat lots of fats which will take longer to digest and sugary foods which will give me energy at first but will drop and give me low blood sugar level. The idea for this came about because I wanted to see if I would feel a huge difference with regard to my energy levels and ability to perform just from the foods I eat.

Why eat nothing? Is that something in the literature or from you experience?

Eating nothing (or next to nothing) is obviously extremely unhealthy but from results from my inquiry and from experience working with other dancers I know that some dancers take dieting to extremes and this is what I want to look at by eating nothing.

Do you have precedents for your trying out these different eating regimes? Where did you get the idea for your intervention and how does it link to your inquiry?

I hope to get some insight into how food will affect my performance in a dance class. When I was researching ‘nutrition for dancers’, authors kept saying how important food is as a fuel. I am not suggesting that dancers take what I find out as fact because everybody is different and as much as I will try to keep the experiment fair I know it has limitations. I got the idea for this from Challis’ article and other literature on nutrition but also from my findings in my inquiry because many participants said that they did not find lessons they had on nutrition helpful and some dancers stated that they do not normally eat healthily, which could mean they try to diet to extremes or they make unhealthy food choices. I wanted to do this experiment to see how this could be affecting their performance.