After spending years starring on her family’s reality show “Duck Dynasty,” Sadie Robertson has spent much of her life in the spotlight. Now, in a new interview, the 23 year-old is opening up about how her faith has gotten her through the struggles she’s faced in life.

Robertson was just 17 years-old when she took second place on “Dancing With The Stars” in 2014. Though she loved her time on the show, she struggled physically afterwards.

“During Dancing With the Stars, you work out so much and you’re dancing 24/7, so no wonder you have the body of your lifetime!” Robertson explained to Entertainment Tonight. “I had this body that I never thought I’d have. I had a six-pack for two weeks, but then Thanksgiving hit and it went away. People started to comment.”

“They were such innocent comments at first, like, everything was great. But whenever my body started looking a little different, that’s when the struggle came in,” she added. “There were people in my life, who were just really negative influences, that would say things that were not uplifting about the way that I looked and how I needed to maintain the body that I had. It was so wrong. I was insecure at the time, so I believed them and thought, ‘Oh, I need to push it.'”

Making matters worse was the fact that Robertson was dabbling in modeling at the time, which only made her struggle more with her body image.

“People would say things like, ‘Oh, if you lost 10 more pounds, you would look like a real model,'” she recalled. “I was literally 115 pounds and already unhealthy. That just messed my mind up.”

Robertson said that before long, she developed “a really unhealthy view” of her body, adding that “an eating disorder is different in a lot of different ways.”

“You can’t stop thinking about your body, how you look, how you should eat. You’re counting the calories, you’re sizing up your legs and all those different things. You’re just kind of completely gripped by it and that’s kind of where I was,” she remembered. “I would look at myself in the mirror and I would think, ‘I’m fat,’ and I was not at all.”

“You don’t realize [at the time] that the things you’re struggling with, you think it’s just about you, but actually it affects a lot of other people around you,” Robertson added. “I pretty much just took the word as it was from the Bible. It talks about how you’re beautifully and wonderfully created.”

In the end, Robertson says her faith in God has gotten her through the tough times in life.

“I started praising God and thanking him for the way that I looked, instead of looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Ugh, I wish my arms were thinner, I wish my legs were more toned, I wish I had her eyebrows’ … whatever it was that I would tell myself,” she said. “Instead I would tell myself, ‘I am so thankful that I have this. I’m so thankful that my legs actually serve the purpose that they should and that they’re able to run, that my arms are able to carry things. That my stomach one day, hopefully, will be able to carry a baby.’ Just what we’re actually designed and created for.”

“It definitely made me stop thinking about myself as much,” Robertson continued. “It allowed me to be able to think of others, and how I can serve them with the body I’ve been given.”

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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