Vanessa Peynenburg is off to Toronto this week, but not for a family trip or any kind of summer vacation or even just sightseeing before she prepares herself to start her high school graduation year.
The 17-year-old St. Albert teenager will be there to participate in the Miss Teen Canada-World contest, a beauty competition for girls and young women between the ages of 13 and 19.
More than 70 finalists come from all across the country to compete for the title each July after winning a regional title through their provincial pageants. Being Miss Teen St. Albert-World 2011 is a big honour, she said, and not one that she takes lightly. After all, she went through so much just to get there in the first place.
"Originally, when I saw the competition I was just kind of interested in it. I thought that it would be a good way for me to just boost my confidence and see how far I could get," she confessed.
"I didn't expect myself to get to this point. I just thought it would be a good experience for me to get past that fear that I have of being in front of people, and just saying, 'This is who I am and I'm OK with it.'"
It wasn't very long before February's Miss Teen Alberta-World competition when Peynenburg was struggling badly with her body image. She developed anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that affected her so seriously that she needed to be hospitalized. When she learned that being a contestant would give her an additional opportunity to talk about a social issue that mattered to her, she just knew that participating was what she wanted to do.
While the pageant itself requires participants to raise thousands of dollars to help support a charity called Free the Children, Peynenburg is using her time in the spotlight to raise awareness of eating disorders, to talk about self-esteem and healthy body image.
"You can recover from it physically — it's still difficult. A lot of people think that you're automatically OK once you gain back the weight but I know that's not the way. I want people to see that the struggle still happens afterwards but that you can still do real things every day."
Peynenburg will get the chance to use her voice during the competition's personal interview, public speaking, community engagement and written essay segments. She says that entering the competition is entirely unlike her but that it has been very good for her psychologically.
"It's something that I feel that I needed to do in order to move forward in treatment."
The moment when she received her crown was, in her words, a "liberating moment."
"I had never considered myself to be beautiful. Nobody had ever really told me that until that point. It was an eye-opener for me. When I have those moments … with my body image and I think that I'm never going to get out of this situation and this mindset, I just think back to all those judges and the audience — they thought that I was OK. That means that I can start taking steps toward being OK with myself as well."
The symptoms of a larger problem
According to various studies quoted on the website for the National Eating Disorder Information Centre, 1.5 per cent of women in this country between the ages of 15 and 24 were affected by eating disorders. Children learn at a very young age many unhealthy mainstream attitudes towards food and weight, with a significant proportion of five-year-old girls associating a diet with food restriction, weight loss and thinness.
You can learn more by calling 1-866-NEDIC-20 (633-4220) or visiting www.nedic.ca.
