Former Miss Teen USA Kamie Crawford recalls being called ‘obese’ as a size 0: ‘I was the smallest I've ever been in my life’

It Figures is Yahoo Life's body image series, delving into the journeys of influential and inspiring figures as they explore what body confidence, body neutrality and self-love mean to them.

Between co-hosting MTV's breakout reality docuseries Catfish and making pageantry history, Kamie Crawford, 30, is no stranger to the highs and lows of life in the public eye. But despite how luxe it may seem from the outside, Crawford says it's not been all tiaras and sashes.

"[There] are a lot of haters," the Maryland native tells Yahoo Life.

Teen pageantry has been a highly scrutinized competition medium since its inception, and Crawford experienced just how tough the industry can be on participants who step outside of the norm when she competed in — and won — Miss Teen USA 2010.

"When I competed, I heard that I was obese, [the] fattest Miss Teen USA," she says, explaining that the ostracization did not stop at her size.

"As far as my skin, I was the first Black Miss Teen USA in a decade. I heard that I wasn't Black enough to be considered the first Black Miss Teen USA in 10 years, all kinds of things … I was like, 'Oh? Not Black enough? Obese? Ok, this is interesting news,'" she says.

Crawford won her first-ever pageant, Miss Teen Maryland, in November 2009, and went on to win Miss Teen USA the following year. But the joys of going from pageantry novice to national winner in under three years were slightly muddled by the unwarranted comments about her size. These statements were especially concerning for Kamie, who says she was the thinnest she had ever been while competing.

"I was the smallest I've ever been in my life. But I did everything the healthy way. I was eating five times a day. I was working out every day, twice a day for three hours each, for a few months leading up to the pageant. So I had gone down from probably like a size 4-6 to a 0," she says.

But due to the age range of contestants, participants are often in different developmental stages, made evident when they take the stage together during competitions.

"I was 17, and you compete with girls between the ages of 14 to 19. So imagine a 14-year-old girl standing next to a 17-, almost 18-year-old, almost woman. You're going to look different, and everyone is different. Everybody's body is different. And they're all valid and beautiful in their own way. But there's no way to compare a 19-year-old to a 14-year-old. If you had to compare your 19-year-old body to your 14-year-old body, I'm sure they'd look a little different," she says.

At the time, the body positivity movement hadn't quite taken off yet, notes Crawford, who says society was still reckoning with the thin-is-in diet-heavy culture of the early aughts.

"We were still recovering from low-rise jeans in the early 2000s. We weren't there yet. It was a different time for sure," says Crawford.

Thankfully, she had an immaculate support system that allowed her to develop an impenetrable sense of self.

"I thank my mom for being a big advocate of just loving yourself," she says. "I'm the oldest of six girls and my mom tells us that we are beautiful and amazing and the best, every single day. If I didn't have that, I don't know how I would have made it through that time."

Crawford, who comes from Jamaican lineage, says that cultural differences also helped her form self-confidence from a young age.

"My family comes from Jamaica, and as far as, like, body positivity, it's just kind of naturally ingrained in us … I think the view of body image is so different in other places in the world than it is here in the United States, and the value that's put on being thin is just not the same in other places," she says.

Her self-confidence, a careful curation of various components both internal and external, would be incomplete without the help of a solid beauty-care routine, she says.

In addition to skin- and haircare, Kamie does not play when it comes to her pearly whites.

"I had braces for two years going into high school. I remember getting my braces taken off right before the first day of freshman year and being so excited, but also so sad because I thought my braces were so cute," she says.

This commitment extends into her latest partnership with Crest and its new preventative Densify toothpaste.

"I've been using Crest for years since my pageant days, using different whitening products that they have. So now I'm not a teenager anymore. I'm taking better preventative care just all around when it comes to my skin — I feel like we hear about that a lot, like, 'take retinols, wear SPF everyday' … But we don't necessarily take the same care when it comes to our teeth." Crest Densify, she says, helps that. "Like, I'm just trying to stay young. That's all I want to do." she says.

Her desire to say young aside, Crawford is immensely grateful that her self-love journey took off long before social media reached its current peak, as she was able to easily tune out the early noise.

"My opinion of myself is more important than anyone else's opinion of me, and I had to live in that," she says. "Otherwise, I would have succumb to whatever people had to say about me."

While Gen-Z does have the added adolescent challenge of navigating what body positivity looks like in a hypercritical digital age, Crawford has nothing but faith in the next generation's quest for self-love.

"At that time, the media was not perpetuating body positivity or really diverse bodies. It wasn't, it wasn't like it is now. That's why I love and have so much hope for this next generation," she says. "There is so much out there, [and] you can see people who look like you everywhere, and there's a lot of beauty in that."

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