Jackie Evancho is opening up about her scar battle with an eating disorder.
The 22-year-old is in the new issue of People magazine, sharing her experience with anorexia, and how it led to a diagnosis of osteoporosis.
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Evancho, who first came to prominence when she was the runner-up on “America’s Got Talent” in 2010 at just 10-years-old, says she realized she needed to seek help after breaking her back in two places in a car accident in January 2021.
“They were abnormal breaks, breaks that you see in 80-year-olds,” she says. “That’s how I learned that my eating problems created osteoporosis. So now I’m a 22-year-old with osteoporosis.”
Confronting that diagnosis also meant facing her eating disorder head on, which has been a real struggle.
“I had to eat [for my bones] to heal, and that really messed me up with my eating problems, because I was gaining weight to heal,” Evancho says. “Once I finally healed, my disorder said, ‘OK, now you’ve got to be really hard on yourself to get all of that out of you . . . and then some.'”
Evancho also recalls the beginning of her anorexia when she was just 15 and going through puberty.
“I noticed that I looked a little bigger to myself, so I asked my mom, ‘Do I look fat?’ And she was like, ‘No, no, that’s just baby fat,'” she says. “So I decided that I was going to start to mildly diet and start working out regularly.”
After not seeing results of the mild dieting, she began eating even less and working out a lot more.
“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.”
The COVID pandemic only made the situation worse, as Evancho says, “The urge to restrict what I’m eating, on top of eating because I’m bored, and panic because I have this distorted view of myself in the mirror . . . it made everything really difficult. There weren’t distractions during COVID.”
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Evancho says she is “still fully in the throes” of her struggle with anorexia, but wants to get healthy and is seeing a nutritionist and therapist.
“I’m still struggling, but I’m fighting, which is good because a year ago I was giving in to it completely, and that’s so dark and painful,” she says. “I’m not healthy yet, but I have been able to implement healthy coping skills and better eating habits.”
Finally, she adds, “There are still issues, but they are so much better, There are days where I feel helpless and hopeless, but I’m sick of living like this.”
