Miss America 2008 Kirsten Haglund, left, spoke to the clients at USF Hope House.

For one young woman, the trigger was an alcoholic father.

For another, it was gymnastics.

For Miss America, it was ballet.

The women gathered Thursday at USF Hope House for Eating Disorders to share stories and get a dose of inspiration from Kirsten Haglund, who became Miss America 2008 after overcoming an eating disorder she suffered as a young teen-ager.

Haglund developed anorexia around age 12 after she went to a summer ballet camp and became more intensely involved in dance. All the best dancers seemed thinner than she was. Alone and insecure about her talent, Haglund started to diet.

“When I started to cut back, it felt very good, very powerful,” she said. But as her problem deepened, dieting became a downward spiral. The more weight she lost, the more unhappy with her body she became. She felt weak and unhappy. Ultimately, starving hurt her dance ability.

“I couldn’t get through a ballet class because I had no energy,” she said.

Haglund began to overcome her illness after her mother intervened, taking her “screaming and crying” to a doctor. It took a treatment team and more than a year for her to return to a healthy weight. She’s worked hard since then to keep a healthy attitude towards food and to understand that she feels better and happier when she eats. She’s learned to find fulfillment through faith, rather than through starving herself. She no longer takes ballet.

“It’s a problem, it’s an illness,” Haglund told the group. “It’s not your fault.”

But it is an onogoing fight.

“I’m just worried that I’m never going to get out of it,” Tampa student Karla Olsen, 21, told Haglund. “Like I’m never going to be fully recovered.”

Olsen said it’s helped her, as she works on that recovery, to be able to turn to Hope House as a resource. The house provides free outreach and support groups for people struggling with eating disorders and their families.

Haglund and the others talked about using food as a way to cope with problems, and how doing so can be as addictive as a drug.

One 15-year-old girl was struck by the contradiction: How did you handle anorexia while you were competing to be Miss America? Didn’t that make it more about your body?

“It wasn’t a trigger for me,” Haglund said. Although she could see how it might be for some young women, she entered the pageant almost on a whim, seeking to win scholarship money. She was active in musical theater and comfortable on stage, so she thought of the pageant more as a performance event, rather than a contest to find the perfect body image.

For the evening gown segment in Haglund’s first pageant, she wore her prom dress. She chose eating disorders awareness because it was something she knew about. But she figured she would talk about other girls’ struggles. She didn’t really think about talking about her own.

“Then I won,” Haglund laughed. “I put myself in a situation where I had to be accountable. I couldn’t slip back.”

But Haglund found the travels and stress of her year of serving as Miss America to be liberating rather than tense. She spent a year on the road traveling, never knowing what she might be asked to do, where she would end up, or who she might be. It showed her she could handle not being in control of her surroundings.

“I had to deal with it and life didn’t fall apart,” she said.

22-year-old Jennifer Goetz came to hear Haglund Thursday and was inspired.

“She’s extremely down to earth,” Goetz said. “She lays it on the line, that she’s not perfect and doesn’t live up to that image…she lets people understand that she goes through the same pressures that we do, and people with eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes.”

Haglund competed with scores of other women to become Miss America. She wore a crown and criss-crossed the country speaking her mind. But in a small room at Hope House Thursday, she was just one more member of a sorority bonded in a struggle against the same illness.

“You’re someone like us,” Olsen told her. “So you understand.”

More than 12 million people in the United States struggle with eating disorders. At some point during their lives, an estimated 180,000 people in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties will suffer from an eating disorder. USF Hope House for Eating Disorders, directed by Pauline Powers, MD, professor of psychiatry at USF Health, is the only organization of its kind in Florida that provides free outreach and supportive intervention for individuals and families struggling with an eating disorder.

- Story by Lisa Greene, USF Health Communications

- Photos by Eric Younghans, USF Health Communications