Tragic Details About Katie Couric’s Life

When she was a teenager, Katie Couric began struggling with bulimia, an illness that continued for years. In an interview with People, she acknowledged that her perfectionism played into disordered eating. However, as a baby boomer, she also blamed the beauty standards of the 1960s on her desire to be super thin. “There was so much pressure on women, and dieting was so much a part of the culture,” she said.

But as her health declined, Couric realized that she was harming her body. Accordingly, it was the death of Karen Carpenter that proved a major wake-up call. “I really just started to understand how dangerous it was,” she reflected. “When Karen Carpenter died [of heart failure caused by years of anorexia] in 1983, it shook me to the core.” These days, in an effort to maintain her peace, she forgoes focusing on weight and numbers. As such, she looks away whenever she’s weighed at the doctor’s office, conceding that the number on the scale is arbitrary.

Speaking to Vogue in 2023, Couric acknowledged that, though she is in recovery, she still struggles with disordered eating, something that she attributes to the ubiquity of toxic diet culture. “You see these women on Instagram,” she explained, “these celebrities who suddenly look much thinner than they were, and you feel like I should be doing that. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s hard to fight it.”