On the surface, Kaitlyn Chana \u201913 had it all together. In fact, she basically owned life.<\/p>\n
The former straight-A student at Lake Brantley High School started her own nonprofit as a teenager that sent cards of kindness to hospitalized children. She was a member of UCF\u2019s President\u2019s Leadership Council, LEAD Scholars and received UCF\u2019s most prestigious student award, Order of Pegasus.<\/p>\n
The radio-TV alumna was even selected as one of 20 people to carry the Olympic torch in 2010 for the Vancouver Winter Games through Calgary, Canada, because of her charity work.<\/p>\n
Yet, underneath the surface, Chana battled through three different eating disorders over 10 years until the day she came to a very hard-hitting realization.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith eating disorders, it\u2019s life or death. If you don\u2019t pick one, unfortunately one is going to overcome and dominate. I didn\u2019t want to die,\u201d she said. \u201cI wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a reporter that\u2019s telling meaningful stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, she\u2019s doing just that and recently returned to campus as part of LEAD Scholars\u2019 Leadership Week to share her personal story and her mission to change the stigma around eating disorders and mental health.<\/p>\n
Chana said several factors contributed to her first eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, when she was in middle school. A perfectionist, Chana said society\u2019s perception of beauty combined with her desire to please someone in her life whose love and acceptance she craved warped her reality. To her, thinness equated to beauty, acceptance and success.<\/p>\n
She began deteriorating until she weighed closed to 60 pounds. She aimed to trim to a 12-inch waist. She carried weights in her backpack and wore weights around her ankles to shed more calories all the while maintaining her perfect GPA and anchoring the school\u2019s morning announcements.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy bones were protruding. When I looked in the mirror, I thought I was morbidly obese,\u201d she said. \u201cI cut everything off. I couldn\u2019t cry. I didn\u2019t even know what happy was if you defined it to me. I couldn\u2019t understand those feelings. When I had doctors, psychologist, a nutritionist trying to help me get healthier, I transferred eating disorders. I was feeling more, but I still wanted control, so I picked up another set of bad habits.\u201d<\/p>\n
She shifted to bulimia nervosa, a serious eating disorder marked by binging and avoiding weight gain. In college, she stopped purging but instead starting binge eating. She would claim control by limiting her food intake for days and then gorge on 10,000 calories in one secret sitting.<\/p>\n
As a student at the Nicholson School of Communication, she began to see the stamina journalists needed daily to be successful in the industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I couldn\u2019t keep this pain and suffering all bottled up inside of me and be able to complete the task for just my basic classes, let alone an actual full time job as a reporter,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
So she visited UCF\u2019s Health Services and for the first time, truly wanted the help she was asking for. They helped her find Winter Park\u2019s White Picket Fence, a counseling center specialized in eating disorders.<\/p>\n
It took baby steps every day, but now after a decade-long journey, she says she is fully recovered. She doesn\u2019t wake up in the morning and go to bed at night thinking about food and weight. When she is hungry, she eats, and when she feels full, she stops.<\/p>\n
And if she is ever in a stressful point in her life, she thinks about the past and reminds herself that those methods didn\u2019t work for years, and they certainly won\u2019t solve problems now.<\/p>\n
She also credits her family, specifically her mother, for helping her through her recovery.<\/p>\n
\u201cTogether, we figured it out. My mom would read books about it, and she would help me through the process. It truly was an exhausting journey, and I can only imagine from her standpoint. There were days where doctors said, \u2018Kailtyn, you\u2019re not going to survive. You\u2019re going to die.\u2019 My mom would say, \u2018You can\u2019t die on me. We\u2019re going to do this together. We\u2019re going to figure it out together. Just hold on.\u201d<\/p>\n
So now Chana wants to help others through the best way she knows how \u2013 storytelling.<\/p>\n
She achieved her professional goal and became a reporter for Action News Jax in 2015 after a brief stint at a news station in Bangor, Maine. On the side, she started another organization, Reel Stories. Real People.<\/em>, which tells stories that inspire, advocate, and educate the public on topics through digital media not typically showcased in traditional news media.<\/p>\n Through the organization, she also wants to shape curriculum about eating disorders and mental health for free distribution to public schools nation-wide. She intends to produce a 30-40 minute film that high school teachers can use, along with a thought-out, written plan featuring common questions, a class activity, assessments and a list of resources.<\/p>\n \u201cI went to a school the other day that had the same text book that I had over a decade ago, and it\u2019s disheartening because there\u2019s only two paragraphs on eating disorders. But if we were able to have that preventative care and talk about it when I was in the class, maybe I didn\u2019t have to go through all this pain and suffering,\u201d she said. \u201cOur goal is to help teachers redirect the conversation on mental health by providing informative preventative care resources. Now, they will be able to instruct their class with a one-day lesson that\u2019s engaging and dynamic, but also resourceful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the surface, Kaitlyn Chana \u201913 had it all together. In fact, she basically owned life. The former straight-A student at Lake Brantley High School started her own nonprofit as a teenager that sent cards of kindness to hospitalized children. She was a member of UCF\u2019s President\u2019s Leadership Council, LEAD Scholars and received UCF\u2019s most prestigious student award, Order of…","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":81026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-twocol.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"lazy_load_responsive_images_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[15992,12],"tags":[202],"tu_author":[],"class_list":["post-81025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-health","tag-alumni"],"yoast_head":"\n