“I woke up one morning and my boobs were huge and I had hips,” says Katherine McPhee. By 17, she had developed bulimia. “I’d starve myself for as long as I could, but when I got really, really hungry, I’d eat and then throw it up.”
“I binged all the time,” she says. “This sensation would overcome my body, and I would not be able to control myself.” Though she also sometimes purged, the bingeing caught up with her. The 5-foot-8 McPhee gained 20 pounds freshman year.
Despite her curvier shape, a Hollywood manager was able to persuade McPhee to return to Los Angeles to audition for TV roles during pilot season. The auditions – or, rather, rejections, which came 95 percent of the time – proved damaging.
“The feedback was, ‘She’s really great. We love her…. But she’s too heavy.’ I felt like a loser. But I was focused on all the wrong things,” McPhee says. “It was ‘I’m fat! I’m ugly! No one wants to hire me,’ not I need help for my eating disorder.’”
Being skinnier was the holy grail. When that happened, she thought, “I’d get my big break. Guys would like me more. I’d be more beautiful. Everything!” It was a destructive mental and physical cycle, and by summer 2005, McPhee was bingeing and purging up to seven times a day.
Enter American Idol. With renewed hope that she’d finally get her big break, McPhee spent the three months between the auditions and the airing of the show attending an intensive eight-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week outpatient program at the Eating Disorder Center of California in Los Angeles.
She also went on the anti-depressant Lexapro. “I feel like all the pieces worked together – the dietitian, the practice meals, the psychotherapy and talking about my feelings every single day for a couple of hours, and that little white pill,” she says.
By eating three balanced meals, two snacks and one dessert a day (“My dietitian would tell me to go to Baskin-Robbins and have a scoop of ice cream – and not the no-fat kind”), McPhee lost about 35 pounds in the seven months before and during Idol.
“I remember getting out of the program and thinking, Oh, I hope I don’t relapse or go back to my old ways. But now I don’t even think about it,” she says. “I don’t use food to fill me up anymore, because I’m filled with something else.”
Including confidence. “I just started wearing bathing suits again, and I think, OK, maybe the cheese on the back of my legs isn’t perfect or I don’t have the strongest buttocks because I don’t work out, but you know what? I’m going to wear them because I look pretty damn good.”
Katherine McPhee and Scientology
She took the Purification Rundown course when she dated a guy who was a Scientologist.
“You take all these vitamins, weird oils and niacin to flush out toxins, and you run on this treadmill. Then you sit in a sauna, get out, go back in and do it again for hours. I did that for 27 days,” she says.
Does she regret it? “Actually, I don’t. I have good memories of sitting in the sauna!” Shortly afterward, she split with the guy – and the religion. [source, pictures]