When she got up on stage for her audition on Australia’s Got Talent and blew the judges away with her rock/opera performance, Jennifer Anderson appeared the picture of confidence. But, the mum-of-two has actually battled with her body image for a large part of her life.
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“I had undiagnosed anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder as an early teen, then moved to bulimia,” Jennifer tells New Idea.
“It got to a point where I was eating two carrots a day and trying to stay under 100 calories.
“I’m a natural hourglass and curvy, so I was never going to look like a stick figure, but you could count my ribs, and my hip bones were poking through my skin. Shortly after that I got help.”
However, for Jennifer the road to recovery wasn’t an easy journey. “I went the opposite direction,” she admits.
“I went from that skinny thing to my heaviest of 110kg and I was medicating myself with food. I would go and buy a family block of chocolate and eat that on my own.”
Since then, Jennifer has changed her eating practices and found a weight she is comfortable with. But she still admits that every day is difficult. “I’m a work in progress,” she adds.
To make matters worse, at only 18-years-old, Jennifer developed an autoimmune skin condition known as Sarcoidosis, which produces painful red lumps on the skin.
“I was one of those rare teenagers who never got a pimple,” she says.
“And then these red purple lesions circles start coming up under my eyes and then they started on my ankles and knees and hands and they’ve sort of spread from there.”
The skin condition caused Jennifer to become even more self-conscious.
“If someone came to the front door, I would hide,” she says. “I was so sensitive about it and I have to wear full-cover makeup to cover it up.”
Both her skin condition and body image struggles led to Jennifer throwing in the towel on her singing career and focusing on her children, but now she is thrilled that she gave singing a second chance on Australia’s Got Talent.
“To do that first performance was a big deal, because I had spent so much of my life saying, ‘When my voice is good enough, then I’ll do something, when I’m slim enough, then I’ll stand up in public’,” she says.
“But at this point, I just have to get out there and forget all the other stuff. You just have to learn to be comfortable with where you are in the now and stop putting things off until the future.”
Giving singing a second chance has worked out well for the mum, who received four yeses from the judges and is set to perform in the semi-finals this Sunday. Of course, she admits that she isn’t any less nervous this time round.
“I am really nervous,” she shares. “But at the same time I’m really excited to take it to the next level.”
