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. READ MORE: Jackie Evancho On Quarantining With Newly Blended Family: ‘Our House Has Become A Home Again’ 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
Read more on etcanada.com