Kristen Haglund was a ballet dancer, but she thought she wasn’t good enough. Other parts of her life were not going well, so she decided to do whatever she needed to do to become a better ballet dancer. That is when she began to develop an eating disorder. She thought she was gaining control of her life, but she was becoming a slave to anorexia by age 15. All she saw in her body was failure. When her parents sought help for her, she began to play along just enough to placate them, but she also began to realize that God sees everything. And things began to change.
Mia Dinoto suffered from anorexia, anxiety and depression before her world was turned upside down. She grew up in a Christian family, but she never read the Bible, didn’t pray and didn’t care about those things. She was diagnosed with OCD and anxiety at an early age. She would have panic attacks all day and not leave her house at times. She had good periods and bad ones, and along the way she developed an eating disorder. She pushed her family away. She pushed her friends away. She was malnourished, and her body was shutting down, but she still thought she was fat. It consumed her. At one point, she was in treatment 6 hours a day. Nothing was working. She turned to New Age practices trying to control her destiny. At the same time, she began watching videos that compared Christianity to New Age religion, and she began to read the Bible. She prayed every night, but it felt like a chore. When she finally got to the Gospels, her world changed!
When Amanda Jane Cooper saw Wicked for the first time, she dreamed of playing Glinda on stage. Theater became her life. She enrolled in the theater program at Carnegie Melon University. As she enjoyed success, that success became her God. Her drive led her into an eating disorder. She starved herself during the day, and she binged at night. After her “crazy dream came true” (she was cast as Glinda in a national tour of Wicked), but she carried terrible secrets on the road with her. This is her story
Navigating by Faith 