AGT’s Jackie Evancho Details Battle With Osteoporosis, Anorexia

Jackie Evancho is giving an important update on her health. 

After sustaining multiple back injuries in a 2021 car accident, the America’s Got Talent singer discovered that she had developed osteoporosis due to an ongoing battle with anorexia.  

“They were abnormal breaks, breaks that you see in 80-year-olds,” the 22-year-old, who placed second on the competition series in 2010, told People. “That’s how I learned that my eating problems created osteoporosis.”

But recovery wasn’t easy.

“I had to eat [for my bones] to heal, and that really messed me up with my eating problems, because I was gaining weight to heal,” she explained. “Once I finally healed, my disorder said, ‘OK, now you’ve got to be really hard on yourself to get all of that out of you…and then some.'”

For Jackie, her eating disorder began to develop when she was 15 and going through puberty. 

“I noticed that I looked a little bigger to myself, so I asked my mom, ‘Do I look fat?’ And she was like, ‘No, no, that’s just baby fat,'” she recalled. “So I decided that I was going to start to mildly diet and start working out regularly.”