Amelia Gray Hamlin is opening up about why she chose to share her battle with anorexia with the world and how it’s helped her get control of her health.
“If I’m being honest, if I hadn’t come out about my eating disorder when I did, I probably would have relapsed,” Amelia, 18, told Glamour.
Amelia, who is the daughter of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna and actor Harry Hamlin, went on to explain that “sharing my story has helped keep me accountable.”
“I have eyes on me 24/7,” she told Glamour. “After sharing my story, they weren’t just anonymous eyes but eyes that knew this intimate detail about my life, that were watching me and my body every single day.”
“When you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, it’s so difficult to continue pushing through even when you have bad days where you just want to go back your old habits,” she told the publication.
Amelia also revealed she chose to “come out” about her disorder because she didn’t want young girls and boys to look at the changes in her body and think it was “normal.”
“All these young girls were following me and commenting on my posts, and I realized I didn’t want them to be following a lie,” Amelia told Glamour.
“I couldn’t allow little girls, or little boys, or whoever, to look at the changes in my body and think I’d just hit puberty — that the really skinny photos of me from the year before were just a normal prepubescent body.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about the message those comments about my body sent,” Amelia continued to Glamour.
When she decided to share her truth, Amelia explained she “felt lighter.”
“I started crying. Even for me, it was powerful to read the truth,” she told Glamour.
However, Amelia also faced other health obstacles.
“In the wake of my anorexia, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease that screws with your thyroid. My body was reacting to being starved for so long,” she told Glamour.
Throughout it all, Amelia said she has learned a very crucial lesson: “nourish my body.”
“I used to hear all the time, ‘Your body is a temple!’ but I really didn’t care,” Amelia told Glamour.
“Learning about how to nourish my body and how to fuel my body with the goods that make my body happy and energized makes me feel good… I’ve come out of it with such a different passion for health,” she said.
The young model has also learned the importance of confidence.
“It transcends weight, and size, and social media filters. When you truly love yourself on the inside, the way you carry yourself is so different,” Amelia told Glamour.
Amelia’s testimony comes after viewers of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills watched as she lashed out at her father Harry, 67, due to her “fear of food.”
While sitting down for a meal with her family, Amelia kept turning away the food her father had prepared, and eventually grew so angry with the actor that she gave him the middle finger.
“Tonight on the housewives you will see how my eating disorder affected myself and my family. There is a scene where I am EXTREMELY rude to my dad and the food that he wants me to eat,” Amelia wrote in one of her Instagram Stories after the episode aired.
“During that time, one year ago — I was not in a good place at all,” Amelia added. “I may have looked like I was recovered, but I was most definitely not. Within the scene, you will see me lashing out due to my fear of food.”
“The person displayed in tonight’s episode is not the person I am. It was the person anorexia made me… I just wanted everyone to know why I acted the way that I did,” Amelia explained.
Lisa, 55, has also opened up about watching her daughter suffer explaining on RHOBH, “I don’t want to see her suffer. You want to fix it,” said the mother of two. “You want to make it go away. You want to erase it. You know, you just want to take your child out of pain. You don’t want your child to be in pain.”
Said Lisa in a confessional interview, “You can’t help but blame yourself. You know, it’s like, ‘What did we do to f— her up?’ Maybe we did something. I don’t know. I just know that it’s really, really hard to watch Amelia be in pain.”
Amelia first revealed her eating disorder in a lengthy Instagram post in March 2018.
Amelia said she woke up “one morning” and decided to stop “sabotaging myself…my health, my physical health, my mental health and everything about myself.”
She continued: “Once I got the help that I needed, shortly after the second photo was taken, I began to try to love myself for me.”
“I am SO beyond humbled and grateful to have the platform that I do at such a young age,” Amelia added. “And to wake up every morning with a little girl reaching out to me and telling me I am her inspiration, really makes me feel like I have a purpose. I went through this journey not for attention, not for people to pitty [sic] me, but to help. I am on this earth to help people, and I know that.”
In addition to making strides with her health, Amelia has tackled a number of major milestones as of lately.
Earlier this month, Amelia graduated from high school and in May the model went to her senior prom.
If you or someone you know is battling an eating disorder, please contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) at 1-800-931-2237 or go to NationalEatingDisorders.org.
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