Katharine McPhee is getting candid about the body image issues she experienced while pregnant with her son, Rennie, now 11 months.
Opening up to Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt on her Instagram Live series Before, During and After (BDA) on Thursday, McPhee says the changes her body was going through “played” with her mind while pregnant with her child with husband David Foster.
“Even though you know your body is going to change, and you expect that, if you’re someone who has control issues with your body … psychologically, it just does something different,” McPhee explains. “It played with my mind a little bit.”
McPhee has been open about her disordered eating struggles in the past, sharing that she was scared to gain weight during her first trimester.
“I was losing control and I was going back to this old disordered version of myself, which was upsetting because I just wanted to enjoy my baby,” McPhee admits. “I actually called my old psychiatrist, from when I was in a program in my early 20s, and he came and sat with me, and said, ‘What’s going on?'”
The singer and actress says her psychiatrist told her her feelings were normal.
“The way I was able to overcome disordered behaviour, in terms of food, was not obsessing and letting my body tell me what was needed,” she explains. “Not being like, ‘It has to be oatmeal in the morning, four ounces of protein,’ because that makes me crazy.”
Through her journey, McPhee shares what she learned about self-love with Pratt.
“For me, I had to take the steps, walk through it, to kind of find self-love. I think it’s reasonable to say that you don’t always have moments of self-love,” she says. “I really struggled during that first trimester. It was difficult for me to find that self-love, self-appreciation. But then I found it later, [and] I think how I found it … is something that I’ll now carry with me. … I really feel like having conversations with yourself are important, because I’ll often find myself talking through a situation, like you’d have with a girlfriend, but to yourself.”
