Credit: Eugene Gologursky/BRAVO
Georgia McCann recently opened up about an eating disorder she’s struggled with since middle school.
After recently seeking nearly a month of inpatient treatment, the 24-year-old Next Gen NYC star addressed her recovery as she recalled the “wake up call” that prompted her to get help and spoke candidly about the darkest moments of her journey.
“[Recovery is] the best thing I ever, ever decided to do … I’m feeling amazing now,” Georgia told PEOPLE. “I had to learn to love myself; that radical acceptance. And it’s really allowed me to reframe my relationship with my body. I’m so proud of where am I today.”
“I know it sounds cheesy, but I’m thankful I’m alive,” she continued. “The weight I was down to, I could have died. I wasn’t a medical emergency, but I was very close to it. So I feel grateful for every moment, and every bite of food I take now.”
Although Georgia is in a good place currently, it was just three months ago when a friend called her a week after the show’s premiere party and told her she feared for her life after seeing her at “the thinnest [she’d] ever been.”
“It was a literal wake-up call,” Georgia shared of the call from her friend. “It was definitely the most severe it’s ever been. I was battling a lot of depression and anxiety at the same time, and I just had no appetite. I lost 25 pounds in like, two months. I weighed 88 pounds.”
As Next Gen NYC began airing, fans took notice of Georgia’s small frame and began to comment online.
“I was mortified, honestly,” she recalled. “It was this 400-comment Reddit thread just like, dissecting my body. And some people were nice about it, saying, ‘She needs help, I hope she’s okay.’ But others were just so, so cruel. And I just didn’t want to look at it. I was so, so ashamed.”
But for Georgia, her eating disorder didn’t stem entirely from self-image.
“It was always centered around control,” she explained. “It started for me around eighth grade; there were things going on in my home life, things happening with my hormones; I felt depressed. What was happening to me was unmanageable, and this was a way to take control of something during a time where I couldn’t control anything else.”
“It was like, a maladaptive coping mechanism of sorts,” she went on. “Like, I was very, very aware of like how thin I was. But there was just something in my brain where I couldn’t stop. It’s the only way I felt safe.”
In the midst of her battle, Georgia restricted her eating and purged.
“There was no one method of control, it was the whole gamut,” she noted. “Most recently, I just wasn’t eating at all. And in a weird way, I mentally trained my mind and my body to be repulsed by food, which made it easier to not eat. And then when I would eat, my stomach had shrunk so much that after five bites, I felt full. So it was sort of this self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Luckily, after hearing from her friend and fans, Georgia decided to make a change.
“I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she reasoned. “I was just really, really not happy with how I was treating my body. I kept saying, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ Nothing about this coping mechanism was bringing me happiness. And that’s actually the antithesis of how I try and lead my life.”
“I was tired; tired of hiding, tired of lying,” she continued. “I was always making excuses when people would ask if I was okay. Like, ‘I’m fine, I just haven’t been hungry!’ And I couldn’t do it anymore.”
After getting help, Georgia felt like she got her life back.
“Letting go of control is like true freedom. And I’ve really felt that way,” she shared. “I did a lot of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) … It helped me address these intense emotions and intrusive thoughts as they came up, and taught me to identify from where they were coming so that I could let them easily pass. And that’s really worked for me.”
Georgia has also shifted her perspective on her body.
“It’s like this vessel that’s allowing me to experience the miracle of being alive,” she explained. “It lets me love people, and create, and travel and exchange with others. So I see it differently now, because for so long it was just this disposable object to me.”