By Karine Keyser—
Brittany Dawn, the fitness influencer who made bank selling “individualized” diet and exercise plans, was about to end her life with a handful of pills after the Texas Attorney General filed suit against her for misleading customers. The Holy Spirit stopped her from committing suicide.
“‘It was the most beautiful presence I had ever felt,’” she said. “‘And I fell on the floor; I remember just collapsing and pills going everywhere, and I was just dwelling in the sweetest of presences that I had ever felt.’”
Today, Brittany Dawn is a born-again Christian. She has a YouTube channel where she tells her testimony and documents her life after encountering Jesus.
Brittany became painfully aware of her body during her senior year in high school in 2009.
“I stepped on the scale to read a weight of 170 pounds – the heaviest I had ever been,” she said. She was NOT overweight or unhealthy. Only by fashion runway standards was Brittany ever so slightly “overweight.”
“Uncomfortable in her skin,” Brittany fell into an eating disorder while working out intensely. How she looked in a bikini was everything to her.
“My skinny obsession grew as I started to become unsatisfied with the fact that I couldn’t see my hip bones and didn’t have a thigh gap,” she says. “It triggered me to start training even harder and restrict my calories even more.”
On Instagram, she was wildly attractive and popular. But inside her insecurities drove her to “wonder who would notice if something ever happened to me and I was no longer here?”
Brittany recognized that her thoughts about being dead were unhealthy. So she got counseling. She was diagnosed with anorexia athletica.
Instead of an eating disorder, she worked on her weight with healthy eating and healthy exercise. She found the formula for success. She began posting about proper diet and healthy exercise to her huge following.
Lots of people wanted to know the formula, so she started a company, Brittany Dawn Fitness LLC, in 2014. Her following only grew on social media.
She started making lots of money.
The huge following grew, the mega profits seduced her.
“I was never told how easy it is to be swept up by the world, how easy it is to be completely swooned by the shiny apple that the enemy places in front of us,” she says. “
I was never taught how much easier it is to live for the world rather than to live for Christ.”
She was selling more “individualized” fitness and food plans than she could humanly design herself alone.
“The business blew up way too fast, and in my own arrogance, I didn’t hire on people,” she admits. “I didn’t have the wherewithal to put systems and processes into place to help that business thrive.”
Complaints were rumbling. Prankster Cassady Campbell got wind of a business out of control and thought he could get views at Brittany’s expense. He pretended to be a father who confronted Brittany at a trade show.
“You scammed my daughter,” the pretend father said.
The video went live. It detonated an avalanche of complaints. The media and social media turned on her. She attempted damage control by appearing on Good Morning, America. The way they presented her quotes didn’t help her cause, she says.
Eventually, the Texas Attorney General got involved, suing her for $1 million for misleading consumers.
She shut down her social media and her business. Presumably, the business went bankrupt.
She was left with nothing. Her self-worth was imbibing off the worldly success. Then there was nothing.
She got death threats. She fell back into her eating disorder and got depressed.
“On Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2019, I had a plan to take my life,” she said. “I walked upstairs to fill up a bathtub. I had hundreds of pills. I wrote a text to my sister that I was fully prepared to send as soon as I swallowed all the pills.”
It was this moment that brought Brittany closer to God than she would ever imagine.
Just as she was ready to take a handful of pills, she felt an overwhelming presence, which she described as “beautiful and overwhelming.”
Today, she runs a Christian ministry called “She Lives Freed,” which she started in 2022 and continues to post on YouTube and other social media apps.
