‘AMERICAN Idol” knock-out Katharine McPhee secretly struggled with bulimia until being chosen for the talent show last fall prompted her to find help.
Oddly though, her most dramatic weight loss came after she stopped binging and purging as many as seven times a day.
That is like “putting a sledgehammer to your vocal cords,” she told People magazine.
After making it onto the show last October, McPhee, 22, sought help.
Since then she has lost 30 pounds.
“I was binging my whole life away for days at a time,” she says. “When I got on the show, I said, ‘You know what? I can do well in this competition.
Let me give myself a chance and just get a hold of this thing.’ “I knew I had put off going to a treatment center long enough – I’d been struggling with bulimia since I was 17,” she says. “Growing up in Los Angeles and spending all those years in dance class, I’d been conscious of body image at a young age, and I went through phases of exercising compulsively and starving myself. . . . Food was my crutch; it was how I dealt with emotions and uncomfortable situations.” Experts say that bulimia sufferers are usually not exceptionally thin or extremely overweight.
“Weight loss is usually deferred until after treatment is finished,” says Melissa Nishawala, M.D., director of the Eating Disorders Service at the NYU Child Study Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine.
“The goal is get rid of the binging and purging behavior and then eat sensibly afterwards and slowly lose weight.” Nishawala says that McPhee’s weight loss is probably within a reasonable timeframe for her treatment.
Since then, McPhee has developed a better understanding of how food can affect your body.
“I learned that there’s no such thing as a bad food,” she says. “If you look at a doughnut, people think it’s a fattening food – why? Because if you eat it you’ll get fat? No, you’ll get fat if you eat 10 doughnuts.”