Nicolle Potvin said she can’t even describe all the things she lost during a six-year battle with anorexia, but today, the Pilgrim alum is finding positive ways to gain from the experience by ensuring that others like her know how to get the help they need.

Potvin, a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island who now has a job in the adolescent in-patient unit at Bradley Hospital, has been deeply involved in advocating for eating disorder awareness. She received a scholarship from the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) to attend their conference in Chicago, organized a NEDA walk at URI, networked with treatment centers in Massachusetts, gave talks at local schools, and has been accepted into graduate school programs in Boston, where she hopes to focus her studies and research on eating disorders.

“These are the things I love to do. I love to advocate for this cause,” she said.

When Potvin found out Rhode Island wasn’t on the map of states recognizing Eating Disorder Awareness Week (this year, it’s February 26 to March 4), she was compelled to act. After some fruitless attempts to get state leaders and legislators to assist, she finally connected with Senator Michael McCaffrey and organized an effort to light the State House up in NEDA’s characteristic blue and green colors from February 24 through March 3. She’ll also have an awareness event at the State House on the 26th where she’ll speak.

With McCaffrey’s help, she raised $725 on GoFundMe to cover the $500 cost of the lights, and will use the extra proceeds to benefit the event and second annual NEDA walk at URI in April.

Raising as much awareness as possible is important, Potvin said, as NEDA estimates that 30 million people in the United States will have a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their life (and since many cases may not be reported, that number could even be low). Despite its widespread existence, not everyone knows the warning signs and symptoms of an eating disorder; even Potvin didn’t recognize them in herself when her disordered behaviors began to emerge.

“Basically, my gist was if you look like a skeleton, you’re anorexic, and if you throw up all the time, that’s a bulimic. When my experience started, it started as a little diet,” she said.

Potvin’s educational efforts have already worked with Senator McCaffrey. He said he had “extremely limited” knowledge of eating disorders before he spoke with her but has since learned more about them and is happy to be a part of her advocacy on the issue.

“It’s becoming more and more prevalent in our society,” he said. “Hopefully, [this effort] makes people more aware of avenues they can take to overcome it.”

Potvin also hopes that through heightened awareness people will begin to understand the difficulty of eating disorder recovery. Recovery is possible, but patients often have to learn how to control the behaviors and negative thoughts that can persist, she said.

“It’s not like a broken leg where you can look at an x-ray and say it’s healed,” she said.

She still deals with those negative thoughts, but Potvin has come a very long way from her hardest days. She lost about 20 percent of her body weight in two months during one bout of the disorder, but today is slowly desensitizing herself to the “fear foods” she refused to touch for years.

In addition to her personal goals, Potvin has a lot of professional goals (at one point she pauses and exclaims “I have so much to do!”) and changes she would love to make in the mental health fields. She believes that her experience with eating disorders will give her an upper hand when it comes to helping others who are also struggling.

“I think you need that special set of eyes and experience to know as a professional what worked and what didn’t,” she said. “As much as you can get reports from patients, there’s nothing like being the patient.”

Knowing that speaking up might help others is what motivates Potvin to continue her advocacy. She survived a disorder that has one of the highest mortality rates of any mental illness (according to NEDA), and she felt that was for a reason.

“I like to think a lot of the time I survived it for a reason, and that reason was to do what I’m doing right now. I think I survived because something in the world knew that I was meant to save other people through what I went through,” she said. “That’s what I like to think and that’s what keeps me going every day.”