A dare from dad is all it took to get Brittany Barnett motivated to enter her first beauty pageant earlier this year.
The 2012 Milano graduate, who is now a sixth-grade science teacher at Schultz Junior High in Waller, was in the Miss Houston-USA pageant where she finished in the top 15 and won the People’s Choice award.
While she did not win the Miss Houston title, pageant officials felt Barnett should move on to the Miss Texas-USA stage.
“The award was announced during the final night before the crowning of the Miss Houston title holder,” she said of winning the People’s Choice plaque. “I was then asked to compete in the Miss Texas pageant which takes place on Sept. 3 and 4. This told me that my path and journey is not complete, and I can still help people and show them that you can survive. You can fight and you can overcome any obstacle that God throws at you,” she wrote in an email interview.
Barnett’s path to the pageant was not a smoothly paved one. She wasn’t a child of the pageant world, she said.
“All my life I was the ‘big girl.’ I never let that bother me when in sports. I always would work just as hard or harder to make sure that I could keep up. After graduating high school and attending college I went through a lot of mental abuse from myself and from relationships. I gained a lot of weight and my self confidence was nonexistent. I found myself in a very low place in life,” she said.
In 2016, she decided to do something about her weight and the attitude she had toward herself, she said.
“I started working out daily. I would start each morning with a run and then do the normal workouts. This was all good until it became an obsession,” she said. “I lived a healthy lifestyle until the workouts became harder and longer, and the intake of food became smaller and smaller. Eventually I found myself running 10 miles a day before work but only eating about 300-500 calories a day.”
The bottom came two years later, when at 83 pounds, she was nearing death’s door. She was diagnosed with depression and anorexia.
“My parents checked me into an Eating Recovery Hospital where I spent about five months. Two of those months were spent on a feeding tube,” she recalled, adding her anger caused her to refuse to eat and lash out at her parents.
She said she was upset with her parents for a long time for putting her in the Plano facility.
“I had lost sight of God and my family. Eventually, after months of working and fighting, I found and regained my relationship with God and my parents,” she said noting that she wasn’t cured, but now knows how to fight the dual disorders.
“I always like to make it known that any eating disorder or mental illness is not something that you can be ‘cured’ from and it goes away. It will always be there. Anorexia is the fear of food or the fear of gaining weight from food. Over my time of having to deal with anorexia, I have learned how to ‘counter’ the thoughts. I have to find my happiness in the moment When I get the negative or bad thoughts, I have to change the thoughts into something positive. If that does not work—because sometimes it doesn’t—I have to find something to take my mind off the thoughts of food,” she said. “This connects with the depression in many ways. I have had to keep strategies to try and keep my ‘head above water.’ Some days are good and some days are very bad, and I have to try and always be prepared for that.
It was in her recovery period, staying with her mom and dad, that he challenged her to enter the pageant in Houston.
She had seen an ad about the Miss Houston pageant so she lightly mentioned it to her dad while they were building a fence on their property in Milano.
“I made a joke to my dad about how I could be the next Miss Houston. His exact words were ‘Why not?’ As I laughed and joked about currently building fence and how I was not good or pretty enough and all he could say was ‘I dare you’.”
Next thing I knew I was applying for the Miss Houston title, she said.
She will be Miss Milam County in the pageant later this year where she hopes to inspire others with her comeback story.
“I am running for Miss Texas to show that you can bounce back from a horrific event such as anorexia. Every single day I battle. Some days I win and some days I lose, but I do not give up. I keep the fight,” she said. “I want those that are also going through anorexia, depression or any other mental illness (to know) that it will be okay, and you can do something with it. I want to be a role model and an advocate to show that our lives are worth living, we just have to fight and push a little harder. We do not have to give in to society’s standards.”
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