The American Idol runner up, Katherine McPhee, struggled with bulimia for five years before the competition.
She talked to People magazine this week and said that at her worst, she was purging up to 7 times a day, which she compares as, “putting a sledgehammer to your vocal cords.”
After auditioning and making onto Idol last fall, she knew she had to get help.
“When I made it onto American Idol, I knew that food- my eating disorder- was the one thing really holding me back,” she says. “I was bingeing my whole life away for days at a time… So 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.’”
She committed herself to Los Angeles’s Eating Disorder Center of California and spent 3 months there undergoing both individual and group therapy 6 days per week.
“I knew I had put off going to a treatment centre long enough- I'd been struggling with bulimia since I was 17. 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.”
She has now left the program and gained a better relationship with herself, and with food.
"I really had to surrender and give up having a free life to do the program, because I'd be there from 9 in the morning until 7 at night… I remember that first night, my dad holding me, crying and saying, 'I don't know why you have to suffer through this, but it's going to be okay.' "
In treatment, she learned about intuitive eating and that helped her to view food as an integral part of life, instead of something to fight against.
"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."
