Editorial: Regulating A Healthy Diet For Street Dancers

We live in a health-conscious nation, but there continues to be a great need for better health education. The fact is that many of us don’t decide to make a conscious decision to change our habits. It’s too easy and comfortable to stay with the status quo. We all know how it feels. As we grow older, we create our own systems to get through life. Change is hard to embrace even though it’s deeply desired. So with this in mind, can we use a technological approach to monitor and regulate a healthy diet for street dancers? This idea is relevant with the incoming wave of smart devices that will populate our household. (Photo above is from a Google Images Search for smart devices.)

Many of us have varied regimens in terms of going to the gym, sessioning, and working on different aspects of our dance. But diet intake is rarely a widely discussed topic. It’s challenging because we also have individual makeups and genetic conditions that require special attention. There is no one formula that can be applied to all dancers. But what if we had smart devices to help us? Manufacturers are talking about fridges that distribute food based on user settings that can also be manipulated remotely. We’re going to see more devices that become integrated into all areas of our lives in the spirit of aiding our changing lifestyles. Think about how smart phones like the iPhone have affected daily computing. We went from palm pilots to smart phones in a short span of time, allowing for the perpetual multi-tasker to perform multiple activities on the go. Now we rely on our smart phones to communicate, share documents, and help us to organize the timetables of our day. It’s not a far leap to imagine smart devices that would inform us of how many calories we take in, what foods we should eat, and the amount of time we should spend exercising.

If most of us think that diet maintenance is too much work, then this is where a smart device can step in and help us. We need something that can be fine-tuned to the caloric needs and intake of a physically active street dancer. This future device could help us follow a calendar based on the nutritional needs for activities we’re training for. We see an early example of this in the wildly popular Nintendo Wii Fit. That project is devoted to a mass audience with elements of yoga, strength training, and balance exercises. But for a street dancer, we may need a more advanced device to help us monitor what areas of our body we need to develop - ie, muscle mass, flexibility, core strength - while giving us feedback on our dietary status.

Any smart device of this type only underlies how important the long-term effects of dieting play on our ability to dance. While we’re not recommending any specific diet plan, what we’re hoping for is a venue for smart devices and medically-approved diet methods to collaborate for a better long-term plan for street dancers.