Portia de Rossi candidly shares her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in this candid memoir. As a young girl growing up in Australia, Portia knew she wanted to be a model. Attending photo shoots and runway shows, the naturally healthy 11-year old was told to lose weight. She was given false measurements to put on her modeling card, then had to “fit” into the sample sizes provided for her fashion jobs. Wanting to help Portia realize her dream, her mother helped out with quick diet advice, sending Portia on a decade and a half long spiral into an unhealthy eating regime that saw her restricting her calorie intake to 300 a day while exercising for hours at a time prior to a photo shoot or audition (once she began acting), to binging on thousands of calories of food at one sitting after her “work” was done. These binges were followed by purging sessions so she wouldn’t gain any weight, and although she landed a job on the hit show Ally MacBeal at a healthy size 8, Portia was convinced no one would accept her as an actress until she could fit into the sample size clothing (usually a size 4) sent to the set.
Portia de Rossi openly describes her crazy thought processes and insane diet and eating plans that kept her losing weight until she was an incredibly unhealthy 88 lbs, but still pinching the stomach fat she saw in the mirror. The secret of her sexuality and her family’s refusal to acknowledge that she was gay fueled a lot of Portia’s inability to love and accept herself, and see herself for the beautiful, healthy woman she was, and it wasn’t until a major health scare that threatened lupus and organ failure, did Portia enter counseling and begin getting help for her disordered eating.
A truly remarkable book, Unbearable Lightness is a must read for just about every woman I know. So many of us struggle with weight and acceptance and trying to fit into the very unnatural and unhealthy Hollywood or fashion industry image of what a woman should look like that we fail to recognize we are already beautiful, and much healthier just as we are, regardless of the number on a scale or clothing tag.
To every woman everywhere who has been brainwashed by fashion magazines and the diet industry into thinking you have to be a size 4, 2, or 0 to be beautiful and accepted, please, please, please!! read this book! Hopefully it will help change the way you think and feel about yourself…for the better.
Till next time, happy reading,
L :)
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."
~ Elie Wiesel
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