When Jackie Evancho was only ten years old, back in 2011, she placed second in America’s Got Talent singing with her angelic voice, she had no idea what her life would look like a little more than a decade later.
Today, in her early 20’s, Evancho is still singing and, in fact, she will be releasing a new album which will be featuring Joni Mitchell’s covers soon.
However, over the last few years, she has been struggling with an eating disorder which, as she explains, has caused her several problems.
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As the opera singer and actress revealed during an interview with People, the problem started when she was around 15 years old. At that time, she looked in the mirror and thought she was fat, so she asked her mom about it.
When her mother replied that this was just “baby fat”, Jackie decided to go on a diet for a while and work out a little in order to lose some weight.
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But since then, the image that she saw in the mirror has never quite met her expectations.
When I started to go days without eating, in my head I said, ‘I know that this isn’t normal,’ ” she says. “I felt exhausted, moody, tearful, but after a bit of time, I started to feel nothing.”
So, although she knew what she was doing was not right or beneficial for herself, she just couldn’t stop it because she had that distorted image of herself.
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But it all started changing when, a little more than a year ago, she was involved in a car accident. When she was taken to the hospital, the doctors found out she had broken her back in two places.
“They were abnormal breaks, breaks that you see in 80-year-olds,” Evancho explains. “That’s how I learned that my eating problems created osteoporosis. So now I’m a 22-year-old with osteoporosis.”
That’s when she realized that she was destroying herself by not doing something to really overcome her eating disorder.
At the time, she had to eat in order for her bones to heal, but while she was doing that, she also felt guilty. And, once her bones were fixed, she felt the need to lose the weight she had gained over the healing process.
Jackie knew that way of thinking was wrong, so, since then she has been seeing a nutritionist and therapist who is specializing in “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a type of psychotherapy that she hopes will help her process past trauma and get her anorexia under control,” People reports.
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As the young singer admits, this is the first time she really feels ready to fight anorexia and she is determined to heal- physically and emotionally.
We are sure that she is powerful and she can do this. It really takes so much strength to fight eating disorders and Jackie obviously has it and anorexia will soon be a bad memory for her.
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Watch her talk about her eating disorder and how it has affected her life so far in the video below.
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