"To this day, it's hard for me to admit I have an eating disorder."
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"America's Got Talent" singer Jackie Evancho revealed that she doesn't "like to hear" that she suffered from disordered eating, but is happy that her parents encouraged her to get help.
Evancho, newly 18, admitted that being a child star likely influenced her illness.
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"I'm just a perfectionist at heart, and that includes myself and what I see I am — I want it to be perfect to me, and unfortunately, I can't do that," she told "Access Hollywood" on Tuesday. "I do think that growing up in the spotlight, being a kid, being surrounded by all these adult women who are beautiful and slender and tall was really difficult for me, because I wanted to be that and I wasn't. And then I started to hit puberty and I got my womanly curves and everything, and it was, for lack of a better word, triggering."
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Evancho says that her body developed in a way she didn't deem perfect, which led to her attempting to alter her own appearance.
"It wasn't happening the way I had envisioned it. And me being a perfectionist, I was trying to, as the process is occurring, trying to switch things around and tweak it, and as a result, I ended up developing issues from it, from trying to control everything," she said.
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Evancho says that she felt fat, stupid, ugly and insecure for not looking like other girls on Instagram — and that she hid her disorder from her parents for two years. It wasn't until she started skipping dinners and going days without eating that her family sent her to get help.
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"I was in denial even throughout treatment for it," she said, adding that fame made it hard to admit she had a problem.
"There was a lot of hiding, a lot of sitting in my room alone and thinking and crying ... I wanted to seem like that strong role model," she lamented. "I wanted to be perfect."
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