Katharine McPhee Fears Her Eating Disorder Would Relapse During Pregnancy

The ‘Smash’ alum admits she was ‘suddenly so obsessed with food’ during the first trimester of her pregnancy and had to reach out to a psychiatrist for help.

AceShowbiz –
Katharine McPhee has opened up about her “biggest challenge” during pregnancy. The former “Smash” star, who has just welcomed her first child with husband David Foster, revealed in a new interview that she was worried she might suffer an eating disorder relapse when she was pregnant.

The 36-year-old singer/actress made the candid confession during an interview for the Monday, March 1 episode of “Dr. Berlins Informed Pregnancy Podcast“. She first divulged, “It just suddenly came up in a way that hadn’t been present in a long time.”

“I have felt really stable in my life in the last four or five years, and my weight has been sort of like more consistent,” the first-time mother continued. “But feeling like there was a relapse after getting pregnant was really shocking and upsetting and concerning for me, because I was suddenly so obsessed with food, starting from this first trimester.”

“I had such a distortion of the way that I looked,” she further explained. “I look back at these pictures and my husband was documenting like every day, because I’d be like, ‘Take a picture of me now. Am I showing?’ And I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, why was I so hard on myself?’ ”

The “American Idol” alum then revealed that she even went to a psychiatrist who had helped her before she joined the singing competition. She recalled him assuring her “that it’s really common for women who have struggled with eating disorders in the past to have almost a relapse, in some sense, when they enter pregnancy.”

“And it made me feel so much better that I wasn’t alone in that headspace … by just meeting with him and him talking me through it,” she added. “It wasn’t like he gave me a bottle of pills and said, ‘Here’s your pills for anxiety.’ That’s not what he did when he met with me, but he was just talking through it and asking questions.”

Although she had not “full-blown relapsed,” Katharine elaborated that “it was definitely a feeling like [she] was overeating and then [she] had that stuffed feeling where [she] couldn’t breathe.” She went on to share, “I couldn’t figure out if [it] because there was a new thing in my body that was making me feel stuffed or if I was actually eating too much food.”

“And there’s just a lot of anxiety,” the ex-girlfriend of Elyes Gabel admitted. “But I weathered it and I’m just really grateful I’m at the end of it [and] that I feel this good and that I look in the mirror and I’m like, ‘Yeah, my legs, my thighs, my arms are a little bit thicker, but I’m okay with it.’ ”