At its highest level, ballroom dancing is quite a workout: Do you think those high-flying acrobatics and fleet-footed shimmies are easy to pull off? Yet somehow pro Mark Ballas — back for the 22nd season of “Dancing With the Stars,” which premiered on Monday night — managed years of athletic feats with a pack-a-day cigarette habit. The son of pro dancers, Ballas picked up smoking while growing up in England, where his mother, Shirley, hails from. (His dad, Corky, is American.) “I was about 15 or 16 when I started,” recalls Ballas, now 29. “Everyone in my household and my culture, my friends, we all smoked. My grandmother was a heavy smoker — my mom would travel and buy her those big duty-free boxes. It was easy to just take a pack without her knowing.” Ballas started dancing at age 5 and began making a living from it when he was around 20, still buying his Marlboro Lights. “I’d quit on my own and not smoke for a few months, but then I’d fall back into it,” he says. “I always knew in the back of my mind that this wasn’t good, but I didn’t really care.” Mark Ballas, right, and Shirley Ballas.Photo: Logan Futej Ballas has won “DWTS” twice, both times with former Olympians — figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi in 2008 and the following year with gymnast Shawn Johnson. Yet despite the pressure of having to teach the likes of Kim Kardashian, Bristol Palin and Shannen Doherty to shake their bonbons, he claims it’s not competition that triggered his cravings. “For me it was about everyday stress — if I got into an argument with a friend or if I didn’t get a job that I wanted,” he says. “If something didn’t go my way, I would turn to cigarettes.” But the habit finally caught up with him. “I was around 24 [or] 25 the first time [when] I really was, like, ‘Whoa!’ ” Ballas recalls. “I was in a class, teaching some of my younger kids, and halfway through I was doubled over, gasping for breath. That’s when I started to feel like smoking was taking a toll.” He never considered switching to e-cigarettes (“I think vaping is an excuse rather than an actual step to quitting”) and dropped the habit altogether with the help of NicoDerm CQ patches — for which he’s become a spokesman. “It worked for me because I’m so active,” he says. “I could put it on in the morning and not think about it for the rest of the day.” Ballas roped in his mother, 55, and they quit together. The pair even participated in the “What’s Your Why” campaign, in which former smokers share their experiences. Ballas has been smoke-free for two years — no worries that the patch will show when he twirls with his current partner, mixed martial artist Paige VanZant. The key to not relapsing: He figured out how to control his trigger. Asked what happens when he stresses out these days, Ballas says, “I don’t anymore,” with a laugh. “Nothing is perfect, so I’m not going to let problems that are inevitable in life reduce me to [picking] up a substance. That’s an excuse, and I try to live by [a motto of] ‘no excuses’ now.”
↧
