Jackie, 47, went through recovery for anorexia while on the Bravo series, and here she shares her journey with HELLO!
When I was writing The Weight of Beautiful, all the stories really poured out of me but I did have moments where I hesitated to tell certain stories, and then I realized it wouldn't be complete without telling those – especially about the ways that I might have hurt my children. Those parts were hard for me to write and I second guessed what people would think, but I know that those experiences are not exclusively mine. They happen to a lot of people and so even the disturbing ones were important.
They happen to a lot of people and so even the disturbing ones were important.
There was one review that began: "This is an anorexia memoir, full stop." And I had always wondered how sick I was on the spectrum, – 'Oh, I'm not that bad, there are people who are worse than me,' – but to see that review made me realize I really was that bad, and I really did find my way out.
View post on InstagramI have conversations about my disorder with my children often; when I decided to go into recovery, I made them watch those episodes so that they understood what I was embarking on, and I also would point out to them, 'Look what mommy's eating now'.
Three of my kids are boys, and the concept of starving yourself is almost foreign to them but I have a 13-year-old daughter, Alexis, and every day that she gets older, she's more and more conscious of her body. She complains about her body sometimes even though she's beautiful, and I struggle to find the right words because I want her to love herself, no matter what, but I also know how hard it was for me to be a young girl.
But after 20 years I still have some weirdness around food and I struggle to find the right words to use so I just try to model really good behavior in front of her, and encourage her to enjoy food, eat everything in moderation and to get physical exercise.
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I blamed my mom for a long time for setting me up with this unhealthy relationship with food because she worked a ton but she had a lot of guilt about not being home and gave us food to ease her guilt. It wasn't until recently, and hearing how her grandparents escaped the Holocaust for a Russian refugee camp where her grandfather would trade valuables for potatoes, that her relationship with food made sense to me.
I am 47 now and when you are younger you think that your parents should be perfect people and have all the answers, but later you realize they were just doing their best. I also think about how many times I tried to break my cycle of disastrous relationship with food and the bad habits I probably taught my kids, and how none of it was malicious; it was just all beyond my control.
The editing on the show was understandable but it didn't tell a complete story; I felt like I was doing a disservice to people by leaving the story there, because it made it look like recovery was a lot easier than it really is, and I really didn't want to give that impression.
Since the release of the book, I have had a lot of feedback from people who are struggling and felt like they never had anybody they could talk to about it; I had these moments where I questioned if I had just revealed all my secrets and made myself look crazy for no reason at all, but when I hear the feedback from people who find themselves in my story I remember why I did it.
When I was really going through it with anorexia, I had not one public person that I could look at and say, 'I know you struggled really badly and you're showing me what recovery looks like and it's not a nightmare.' I didn't know what recovery looked like and so I had no faith that anybody as bad as me made it out.
I really want to give that to people.
Evan was very much in favor of me writing the memoir as well, despite his initial concerns when I first joined the show, but I only let him read the book about two months before it came out. I think I was very respectful to him, but also truthful and he really would have done anything for me to recover by that point.
I also worried about what my father would think when I said that he would laugh at old videos of me, and I worried what my mother would think when I said that I blamed her for all of this – but there was no one in my life that had any problem with anything I wrote.
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I was also fearful that people would take tips from the book when I shared my experiences; I worried they would think it would help them to lose weight. But what I would like the biggest takeaway of this to be is that eating disorders are a living hell.
They are torture and deadly; you destroy your body.
I thought that I was invincible and I would live to old age no matter what, and I want people to understand that not one bit of it is worth it. You can choose to slowly die or you can choose to recover and live a really beautiful life.
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