Mental health matters. Even though Katharine McPhee was experiencing normal weight gain during pregnancy, she struggled with thoughts to the contrary.
“Even though you know your body is going to change and you expect that, if you’re someone who has control issues with their body … psychologically, I think they just do something different,” McPhee, 37, told katherine schwarzenegger on the latter’s Instagram Live series Before, During and After (BDA).
McPhee welcomed her son Rennie with her husband David Foster in February 2021. Nearly a year after giving birth, the Scorpion alum reveals how her changing body really affected her.
“The journey with self-love and people struggling with weight, it has ebbs and flows, right?” she said on Thursday’s February 17 episode. “You have seasons where there is no problem when you wake up and your body tells you that you are hungry, you eat, and then you have days where all you do is think about food. For people who are on that journey, that’s their kind of struggle in life. I can identify with that. As I got older, it got a lot better. And when she was pregnant, she was kind of reactivated.”
The California native noted that she gained around 45 pounds, a very typical amount for her height and weight, but McPhee stressed that everyone has an individual experience. She was very hungry in her first trimester and she was worried that she hadn’t. McPhee detailed intrusive thoughts in which she worried about becoming “so fat” and hating herself.
“He played with my mind a little bit,” the actress explained. The new mom has previously been open about her struggles with eating disorders and bulimia as a teenager and signed up for therapy during his senior year of high school.
She wanted to enjoy being pregnant, but found herself obsessed with thoughts about food and body image.
“I felt like I was losing control and going back to this old messy version of myself, which bothered me because I just wanted to enjoy my baby,” McPhee told schwarzenegger32, who is expecting her second child with her husband Chris Pratt.
The former Smash star reached out for help when he realized his mental health was in trouble. “I actually called my old psychiatrist, from when I was on a show in my early 20s, and he came over and sat me down and said, ‘What’s going on?'” she recalled.
McPhee was surprised to discover that this thought pattern was completely normal, and that the hormones of pregnancy can cause a recurrence of mental health problems. This was a great relief to McPhee.
“I was able to enjoy the rest of my pregnancy,” she said.
the american idol alum also decided to stop seeing her dietician and realized that obsessing over diet standards during pregnancy only made her problems worse.
“The way I was able to overcome disordered behavior, in terms of eating, was to not obsess and let my body tell me what it needed,” she said. “Not saying, ‘It has to be oatmeal in the morning, four ounces of protein,’ because that drives me crazy.”
In October 2021, McPhee exclusively saying us weekly that she was prioritizing both time with her baby and her psychological health.
“I’ve been trying to just enjoy motherhood and don’t worry about the size [of] jeans I obsessively want to be in. I’ve been kind of happy where I am,” he explained to Ushighlighting the importance of “a great healthy state of mind” above all else.
