Selective Bulimia: A Sign of the Times

June 29, 2006

Katharine McPhee was an American Idol princess. In the beginning, she had it all. She was beautiful, seemed somewhat smart, and had a lovely voice. I, for one, thought that she was going to make it all the way to number one. I (and millions of others) believed Katharine and Chris would be the final two.

While Chris did not make it due to malfunctioning ballots, Katharine made it to the last American Idol show. In the end, she was up against the Lounge Lizard King…Mr. Soul Patrol himself…Taylor Dicks…uh I mean Hicks.

By the final show, I was secretly hoping she would not win. Of course, I didn’t want Taylor to win either, but that is a story for another blog. In the last American Idol shows, Katharine’s voice started showing signs of strain. Her voice would sound flat, she was forgetting words in her songs, and she was not showing star quality. She was a let down at a point where she was supposed to be impressing people.

However, fair is fair and Miss McPhee ended up being number two. Though the excitement of American Idol had died for me the day Chris left, once the winners were chosen everyone else seemed to let the thrill taper off as well, and Katharine McPhee was all but a forgotten name. Well…at least until Katharine appeared in the news again with the headline, American Idol saved my life.

As I read this, I could not help but shake my head. I did not know what her problem was but I knew that it was going to be more foolish than the headline was letting on. Sure enough, they did not let me down. Katharine McPhee suffered from Bulimia.

The articles I read explained how Katharine had suffered (she is now cured) from Bulimia for seven years and threw up as much as seven times per day. She blamed the bulimia on her California lifestyle. It was hard growing up in a beautiful society and being her. However, the minute she was accepted to American Idol she got the help she needed to succeed.

She was 165 pounds at that point, but after getting the help she needed she lost 30 pounds and is now healthy.

Maybe she did not mean it the way she said it, but she implied that she would still be throwing up if she had not been accepted to American Idol. It sounded like though she knew it was bad for her it was better than not being perfect. Of course, leaving your dinner date to throw up your steak would not be a perfect trait even if your body did look nice.

I highly doubt Katharine was bulimic. It sounds as if she was looking for attention. While I do not know a great deal about bulimia, I do know that you cannot give it up that easily. So, while Katharine may not have the ability to remember her songs, according to her, she has enough will power to break a seven-year habit. The sad thing is that she is now a role model for young girls, to which they will hear it is okay to be bulimic, at least until your famous!

There are millions of women with eating disorders in the world. Some of these women will never be famous, healthy, or even remembered as they end their lives in a slow kind of suicide. Should we be happy Katharine McPhee escaped such fate or should we realize that she did this to herself? After all, the other women who are not so lucky cannot get help until we realize that this death sentence is not one that should be celebrated.

We should not be proud of Katharine. Instead, we should ask her what she was thinking and why she had so little self-worth as to throw up. Better yet, ask her why her self-worth is still so low that she needs to broadcast her secret to the world to get attention.

Technorati Tags: Katharine McPhee, Bulimia, Eating Disorder, Selective Bulimia, American Idol

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