Cheryl Burke reveals Dancing With The Stars heightens body dysmorphia

Cheryl Burke has claimed her body dysmorphia is heightened by Dancing With The Stars.

The 38-year-old professional dancer says her career choice is to blame for her suffering from the mental health condition where a person spends a lot of time worrying about flaws in their appearance.

‘I have body dysmorphia because I’m a dancer,’ Cheryl said while appearing on the ‘HypochondriActor’ podcast hosted by Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali.

‘I mean, tell me one dancer that doesn’t. When I look at myself in the mirror and someone says, ”Oh, you look amazing” I see someone who is overweight, and in my eyes and in my way of judging myself, not amazing. So it’s like no matter what I look like,’ she said.

Cheryl admitted that it was ‘so ridiculous’ that she saw herself as fat because when she watched herself back she was the opposite.

‘I was pretty skinny and yet I was still giving wardrobe hassle in our fittings,’ she said. ‘Like meaning not hassling them, more like, ”Ugh I feel like s***” or ”Oh my god look at my fat roll.” It’s so ridiculous,’ she said.

Cheryl has been fat-shamed by viewers of Dancing with the Stars. 

She said: ‘The nation decided to call me fat about season seven or eight when I actually got off my birth control and I retained 15 pounds of water weight.’

Over the years, she’s been put on crash diets by coaches, and being surrounded by mirrors in dance studios and the pressure of being on television has all added to her body issues.

Cheryl thought she would lose weight coming off birth control, but she ended up gaining instead, and that led to her being trolled. 

‘Normally people lose weight when they get off birth control. So I decided to get off of it right at the beginning of the season and I gained weight like in less than a week, literally 15 pounds of water weight. And then it was like a big deal, like ”Cheryl’s too fat for TV” and then I had a couple of my co-workers blasting my ass too, and then I would wake up to like KTLA ”Cheryl’s too fat.” I was like, this is crazy,’ Cheryl said referencing a local Los Angeles television station.

The choreographer added how her BDD will improve when she’s finished her stint on Dancing With The Stars, but it won’t go away completely.

And she admits she will need to do some healing before she can consider having children because she wouldn’t want to blame them for changing her body. 

 ‘I do believe that it will always be a problem. Maybe this is why I haven’t frozen my eggs, maybe this is why it’s hard for me to even say that I’m ready for a kid is because the last thing I’d want is to blame my kid for the way I look at myself. That is just not ideal. You have to heal first before we do that,’ Cheryl said.

It was reported in February that Cheryl had filed for divorce from Matthew Lawrence, 42, after getting married in 2019. 

The upcoming 31st season of DWTS will be moving to the Disney+ streaming service.