MISS AMERICA, KIRSTEN HAGLUND, SHARES PERSONAL JOURNEY
WITH EATING DISORDERS AND RAISES AWARENESS
Excerpts from an Interview with ANAD - May 3, 2008
ANAD: What led to your decision to talk to people about eating disorders?
KIRSTEN: I was able to look at it, “there are so many young women that are sick.” And I saw them…it actually helped me to say “wow, this is really a serious illness.” And I’m not alone, but look how terrifying it is. So I did see them and came across them and we need more media attention on that”
ANAD: One of the things on the website that was said is the defining moment in your life, realizing you had an eating disorder and you are quoted as “making the decision, my own decision, to recover.” What stage was this? Was this before your parents took you in?
KIRSTEN: No, that was after. The first time I saw a doctor, and I was told that I had anorexia, I said “no, I don’t.” I didn’t like that word, that word was very scary. And it took me a while to actually say it. I was in complete denial, and I thought that I could just blow off the doctors. I thought that I could just gain weight. I said, ”you are not skinny enough to be sick, you don’t look like reed thin anorexic girls … you must not be. They don’t know.” But I educated myself … that was a huge thing… I looked online. We looked at some of the medical sites, sites like yours. The way they talked about the symptoms and physical consequences, I became educated. My parents are both nurses and they knew how serious it was, and I didn’t. Then, I started to see the physical consequences and experience them, because I lost a drastic amount of weight. I hadn’t started to really feel all the physical symptoms yet and once they started to kick in, and I felt the fatigue, I started to realize, “Oh! That is the reason I don’t want to get up out of bed in the morning, because I’m severely depressed!” I started to realize, and that was very scary for me, there were so many things that I was always very determined to do with my life.
ANAD: When you were going through the denial stage, did you try to hide the symptoms?
KIRSTEN: I did, I completely avoided social situations with food. I lost a lot of friends and was very paranoid about food and the fear of gaining weight. That was the scary thing about recovery … the fear that only part of me wants to get better. You want to get better psychologically, and you want to feel better, because it is so depressing. But the fear of gaining weight is so intense, so intense. I’m not going to be as good of a person, I’m not going to be as good at my crafts if I gained weight so that was the biggest thing to.
ANAD: Did you seek reinforcement among any of your peers when you were going through some of your bad stages as far as support to lose weight, or like that?
KIRSTEN: Actually I had a couple friends who were struggling with eating disorders at the same time, and in a way, it was kind of contagious. I didn’t want to let it consume me. We made a family decision that I would stop doing ballet as intensely as I have before and decided to do musical theater. I took myself out of that environment. I really started to work with my treatment team, my nutritionist and my psychologist and slowly, of course, it started to change. I started to realize that once I re-nourished myself and started to see the positive effects of food as fuel rather than the enemy and it really… that started to really help.
ANAD: We see it all the time, ANAD has a Hot Line, and listening to the parents call in, not having a clue about eating disorders. It is fantastic to do what you are doing.
KIRSTEN: That is what’s so great about lobbying for eating disorders coalitions, recently… for the mental health parity to pass this year. I really want the mental parity bill to pass. But also, what’s so great about this piece of legislation is that the federal response to eliminate eating disorders, one of the huge parts of the bill, is increasing federal funding for research so that we could have more numbers, so we will have more substantial data, and substantial evidence that this is a huge epidemic. We could get places like the National Association of Mental Health, to start more studies. And also, then, we have that data to go to schools and say this is a huge problem. Any program that addresses obesity also needs to address eating disorders. One of the great things about it is increasing education not only for young people but also for medical students who are going into a medical career. I felt really lucky that my pediatrician and my doctors recognized it as an eating disorder but so many girls go to the emergency room and have a remote heart rate, they are about to faint and pass out and the doctors say “oh you are just tired” or they don’t recognized the symptoms of an eating disorder. The legislation is saying, we need training for medical students, because they are just coming into the medical field. That’s why I’m so excited about that.
Kirsten Haglund (left) and ANAD Volunteer and U.S. Rhythmics team Member, Kristen Kaye (right) discuss the need to raise awareness of eating disorders and the need to fight deadly online pro anorexia web sites and social networking communities.