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My Eating Disorder Recovery & Founding the Kirsten Haglund Foundation – Part 2
My Eating Disorder Recovery & Founding the Kirsten Haglund Foundation – Part 2
What I try to emphasize so much when I have the opportunity to speak to Women, and men, too, but I have a special heart for women, is that I think that there is this misconception for people who are looking at eating disorders from the outside that girls who are thin and beautiful are happy and that, if you lose weight, you’ll be happy.
They believe that fulfillment comes from being beautiful, desirable, attractive, etc.
When you’re struggling with an eating disorder, the goalposts keep moving. It never leads to happiness. In fact, it just makes you more depressed and have more despair, which causes you to feel worse about yourself, which causes you to restrict or binge and purge more.
It is a horrible cycle that you just get further and further down into and, without treatment, you can’t get out by yourself.
That is one thing that I think people need to hear: eating disorders are not phases. They are not something that you can just snap or grow out of or that time changes. It really is a serious mental health issue that needs really good treatment.
The other thing I want to emphasize about my story and my journey is that, yes, a lot of it, in the beginning, had to do with wanting to be a thin ballerina but that was really a manifestation of a deeper, underlying, emotional issue. I wanted to be valued. I wanted to be worthy, and I wanted to be loved and cherished.
When so many other, chaotic and destructive, things are going on around you, especially in your family life, you just want to be seen and be found significant and valuable, and that is for what I was really searching.
My eating disorder never gave it to me. It is a huge liar.
Fast forward three years, when I was about 15, my parents finally stepped in and got me into treatment.
Of course, I was initially extremely resistant. I didn’t want to go at all, and my parents got me into outpatient treatment because it was really the only thing they knew about at that time in the Metro Detroit area, where I grew up.
I started seeing a Primary Care Physician, a Nutritionist, and, obviously, a Psychologist.
To get on this recovery journey was excruciatingly hard. I would say, for about the first six months, I was in total denial that I needed any help, that I had any problem, that I wanted to get better.
I thought I would just try to gain enough weight in order to get my period back so that I could food my doctors and say that I was okay so they would stop harping on me.
I couldn’t fool them.
It was about six months into my outpatient treatment that I had a “Come to Jesus” moment, bother figuratively and literally.
I was over-exercising on a treadmill, and I almost passed out and suddenly felt very out of control of my body for the first time in my life.
I was a dancer. I knew every single muscle of my body. I knew every single feeling, and I knew how every single little joint pain or muscle twinge felt. I always had a very strong mind-body connection but, at that moment, I felt completely out of control of my body.
That was when I realized that people actually do die from eating disorders. I had heard that my doctors had told me that, I had read that, but I’d never actually really believed it.
It was in that moment that all of these emotions kept flooding up from inside of me. Desires that I didn’t even realize that I’d had that I wanted to grow up, I wanted to eat birthday cake again, I wanted to get married, I wanted to have kids, I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world, I wanted to learn a new language.
I realized all of these things I wanted to do in my life and that being enslaved to the eating disorder and constantly being on the track it had laid out for me, for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to do those things of what I dreamt.
I really wanted to be more than just someone with an eating disorder for the rest of my life.
That was really the turning point for me.
To say that recovery became very easy from there would be a total lie, it obviously didn’t.
It was two steps forward, one step back.
Three steps forward, two steps back.
It was so hard, and there was a lot of pain and struggle between me and my family and so many relationships that were very hurt and needed mending.
After two years of working with my outpatient treatment team, I was in a place where I was able to be weight-restored and get a lot of my bone density back.
I began following my regular meal plan and eating a diversity of foods and cooking for myself and all of those wonderful things. Now, I absolutely love cooking!
Not only all of that, but I also had the tools in my emotional tool belt so that, when I faced a challenge or trial or everything in life became chaotic again like it did when I was young, I knew how to handle my emotions, how to feel and how to honor them.
I came to understand, and am still beginning to understand, the perfectionism.
Perfection is an impossibility. You’re never going to please everyone.
To realize perfection is impossible was huge for me because I lived so much of the first 18 years of my life just trying to please everyone.
I think I really learned that lesson well as Miss America because you’ve got millions of people who are looking at you and have an opinion about you. What you look like, what you wear, what you say, what you do, everything!
I realized very quickly that I could not please the 330 million people in this country, much less fans in Singapore and Thailand and the Czech Republic.
Those were some of the deep underlying emotional roots of what I struggled with, and I really felt that I had a wonderful skill set, afterward, to move on and face those things.
I want to emphasize, to whoever might be listening, whoever is going through this, or who is a family member of someone who is struggling that every story is so different. No one’s journey looks the same.
So, I’m sharing mine as an effort to be vulnerable and open about what I went through and the circumstances of my journey. But, in no way, do I want anyone to compare their struggle, their timeline, their feelings, or their pivot-moment to mine.
Every single one of us has a very different story. Each of our lives is different. Our circumstances are different, and that’s okay, that is valid, and that is a reality.
No one’s story is ever going to look the same. Embracing and accepting wherever you are in the journey is really important.
Please See
My Eating Disorder Recovery & Founding the Kirsten Haglund Foundation – Part 1
Source:
Virtual Presentation by Kirsten Haglund in the Dec. 7, 2017 Eating Disorder Hope Inaugural Online Conference & link to the press release at https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eating-disorder-hope-offers-inaugural-online-conference-300550890.html
About the Presenter:
Kirsten Haglund served as Miss America in 2008 and now is proud to be the Community Relations Specialist for Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center and an “Ambassador” for the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). As a television personality and commentator, Kirsten appears frequently on Fox News Channel, HLN, Fox Business Network, and Huff Post Live to comment on women’s health issues, celebrity culture, social issues, women’s empowerment and the millennial generation.
About the Transcript Editor: Margot Rittenhouse is a therapist who is passionate about providing mental health support to all in need and has worked with clients with substance abuse issues, eating disorders, domestic violence victims, and offenders, and severely mentally ill youth.
As a freelance writer for Eating Disorder and Addiction Hope and a mentor with MentorConnect, Margot is a passionate eating disorder advocate, committed to de-stigmatizing these illnesses while showing support for those struggling through mentoring, writing, and volunteering. Margot has a Master’s of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Johns Hopkins University.
The opinions and views of our guest contributors are shared to provide a broad perspective of eating disorders. These are not necessarily the views of Eating Disorder Hope, but an effort to offer a discussion of various issues by different concerned individuals.
We at Eating Disorder Hope understand that eating disorders result from a combination of environmental and genetic factors. If you or a loved one are suffering from an eating disorder, please know that there is hope for you, and seek immediate professional help.
Published on June 26, 2018.
Reviewed on June 26, 2018 by Jacquelyn Ekern, MS, LPC.
Published on EatingDisorderHope.com
