She gave birth to a son, her first child with husband David Foster last week.
And Katharine McPhee spoke out about how her pregnancy brought up past struggles she had with her food and her body during Dr. Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy Podcast.
The 36-year-old new mom said during the podcast that her ‘body-issue stuff’ was the ‘biggest challenge’ during her pregnancy, per People.
Candid: She gave birth to a son, her first child with husband David Foster last week. And Katharine McPhee spoke out about how her pregnancy brought up past struggles she had with her food and her body during Dr. Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy Podcast
Kathrine, who noted that she had gained 40 pounds during her pregnancy, spoke out about her previous battles with disordered eating and bulimia in a 2017 interview with Health magazine.
Katharine said: ‘It just suddenly came up in a way that hadn’t been present in a long time.’
She said that she previously ‘felt really stable in my life in the last four or five years, and my weight has been more consistent.’
Katharine 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, and I had such a distortion of the way that I looked.’
Speaking out: The 36-year-old new mom said during the podcast that her ‘body-issue stuff’ was the ‘biggest challenge’ during her pregnancy
She said while there was a lot of ‘anxiety’ she ‘weathered it,’ noting that she’s ‘just really grateful I’m at the end of it [and] that I feel this good and that I look in the mirro and I’m like, “Yeah, my legs, my thighs, my arms are a little bit thicker, but I’m okay with it.”‘
Katharine didn’t feel like she had a ‘full-blown relapse’ but it ‘definitely a feeling like I was overeating and then I had that stuffed feeling where I couldn’t breathe and 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.’
Katharine said ‘she was very obsessed with food’ during ‘the first trimester and into the second trimester.’
The mother of one explained: ‘I think it was also because I was going back to film on the show on Netflix that I had started, [which] obviously paused during the [COVID-19} pandemic.’
She revealed the hardest part was ‘feeling like I was relaxing in some capacity with my food issues.’
Lovebirds: Katharine said ‘she was very obsessed with food’ during ‘the first trimester and into the second trimester;’ seen February 24, 2021 at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills
Katharine said she felt ‘ravenous’ during her first trimester and it led to her ask herself it its the eating disorder version of her or her body wanted to eat: ‘When I did eat, I would feel really full and it was very confusing [and] made someone who felt like I had it figured out, the food issues, [feels like] suddenly I didn’t have any of it figured out.’
She added: ‘I look back at these pictures and my husband was documenting 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 singer/actress said she then decided to reach out to a psychiatrist that she had previously worked with during her time on American Idol.
Katharine said the psychiatrist told 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.’
Her words: The singer/actress said she then decided to reach out to a psychiatrist that she had previously worked with during her time on American Idol
Adding: ‘And it made me feel so much better that I wasn’t alone in that head space… by just meeting with him and him talking me through it. 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.’
When she reached her second trimester, she said the experience ‘got a lot better.’
Katherine and David, 71, welcomed a baby boy last week; he is already father to five daughters from previous relationships.