Wingate sophomore became teen author after struggling with eating disorder

By Chuck Gordon

By high school, Katelyn Olmsted had grown to love volleyball. A versatile talent who played varsity and jayvee as a ninth-grader, she found the sport fast-paced and exciting, and she loved the camaraderie with her teammates. It didn't hurt that the hours of practicing each week were helping her shed pounds.

In middle school, Olmsted says, she had been "on the heavier side," hitting 160 pounds on her 5-foot-3 frame by eighth grade. After enduring teasing in middle school, she became very weight conscious in high school, especially since she was at a new school where she didn't know anyone. Instagram, where "perfection" is the goal, didn't help.

So Olmsted simply didn't eat. She first gave up breakfast, and when she realized most of her friends didn't eat lunch, she started skipping that too. By the time she got home from volleyball practice close to 9 p.m., she'd head to her room to study, having eaten only a protein bar all day.

Olmsted started wearing baggy clothes to hide a body that was slipping past healthy and heading quickly toward being underweight. She refused to go on a family vacation to Florida if she wasn't allowed to bring her scale. She stopped seeing friends, and she skipped school often, too bereft of energy to get out of bed. If she did go to school, it was to escape her mother's pleas for her to eat something. "I was passing out," she says. "I was pale. I was sick all the time."

Anorexia was overwhelming Olmsted's life. "It got to a point where I had to choose between my eating disorder and volleyball," she says. "I chose the eating disorder."

Today, Olmsted is a happy and healthy rising sophomore at Wingate University and, not yet out of her teens, the author of two books (with another on the way). She has also come up with the "7-21 challenge," as a way to help herself and others improve their self-worth and keep eating disorders and other mental-health challenges at bay.

Katelyn Olmsted was inducted into the Presidential Amassador program by President Rhett Brown during the blue blazer ceremony last fall.

But before she could accomplish any of that, she had to hit rock bottom and go through recovery. Seeing her daughter wasting away, Olmsted's mother reached a breaking point. She asked around and landed on a treatment center in Durham, where Olmsted spent three months learning to have a healthy relationship with food.

It wasn't easy. Being too weak to walk, Olmsted says, "I didn't touch grass for three weeks." She was deemed to be suffering from "refeeding syndrome," in which her body could accept only a certain amount of protein before putting too big a strain on her heart. Her food intake was monitored carefully. "If I ate one gram of protein too much, I could have gone into cardiac arrest," she says. Olmsted had her blood drawn twice a day to monitor her health, and at one point she was on a feeding tube to ensure that she was taking in the right amount of nutrition.

Olmsted was also basically on her own at the clinic. On Saturdays her mom would drive two and a half hours each way to visit with her daughter for one hour. They could use Olmsted's facility-issued flip phone to chat for a maximum of 30 minutes a day, but there were restrictions if Olmsted didn't reach her caloric-intake goals. "If there was a day I was really struggling with my treatment, I only got 10 minutes to talk to my mom on the phone," she says.

Olmsted took high-school classes at the clinic, but she also had a lot of free time, which she filled by writing in a journal.

"I had to find coping skills, and one of my coping skills was writing," she says. "I found I really enjoyed writing out my thoughts and feelings and what I'm learning."

Fellow patients at the treatment center encouraged Olmsted to turn her daily writing into a book, and six months after she had returned home, she had finished "Daily Dos of an Eating Disorder to Recovery," a memoir about her struggles with anorexia.

"It was about my experience in treatment and what I went through, my story of dealing with anorexia, and literally my whole time in treatment, out of treatment," she says. "There's also some advice, tips, personal stories. That one was like my personal journal entry of a book."

Olmsted found and hired an editor and a book-jacket designer and then figured out how to self-publish (both of her books are available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble). She spent the next two years working on her second book, "The Recovery Click," which features other people's experiences with eating disorders, especially "what made them choose to recover and what they got out of treatment." That book came out this spring.

Olmsted hopes that her books help others who are struggling.

"I always thought, Why me? Why do I have to go through this?" she says. "But then I realized I have a gift to help other people and advocate. One of the statistics is that someone dies of an eating disorder every 52 minutes. I want to change that. Even if it changes by one minute, I want fewer people to have to go through this."

The 7-21 challenge is designed to help too. One Sunday, Olmsted heard her pastor say that it takes seven positive words to counteract the effects of one negative one, so she started challenging friends and family to look in the mirror and say seven words of affirmation three times a day.

"Our brains will feed on the negative, and it'll manifest," she says. "That's kind of what happened with me. I was constantly fed this negative.

"I wanted to promote the fact that we endure so many negative words in our life, knowingly and unknowingly, but we never sit there and focus on the positives that cancel out that negative. If people just said seven positive words three times a day, they could start to reframe their thoughts and have a more positive life."

Despite the interruption for treatment during her sophomore year, Olmsted managed to graduate from high school six months early, having been enrolled in an online school as a junior and then homeschooled her senior year. She was planning to attend Appalachian State University, where her brother is a student, but when Wingate came calling she realized she needed a smaller environment.

Olmsted was asked to apply to become one of the first cohort of Presidential Ambassadors, and through that program she volunteers at campus events. She's also had an opportunity to tell her story to a wider audience.

"Wingate is amazing!" she says. "I was nervous, because obviously I hadn't done anything in person since I dealt with my eating disorder. But everyone at Wingate is so supportive, so nice. It feels like home."

Olmsted is studying psychology and one day hopes to enter Wingate's master of clinical mental health counseling program, so she can ultimately work with young people struggling with eating disorders.

As she works on her third book - a work of fiction this time - she hopes readers of her first two books will "ride the wave" of recovery.

"It's waking up every day and choosing to the hard thing, even if you don't want to," she says. "I still do that today. You have to wake up every single day and be like, 'I'm going to do this.'"

For more on Olmsted, check out her interview with Wingate student Godbless Pelpuo on his podcast, Brink.

July 16, 2026