"Unbearable Lightness" by Portia de Rossi

I tend to skip by celebrities' autobiographies.  I'd rather not read about how terrible it is to be fabulous.  But my friend recommended "Unbearable Lightness" by Portia de Rossi to me, and, since I trust her judgement, I read it. 

Portia de Rossi is an Australian actress (I had no idea she was Australian) who was in a few movies I'd never heard of, but really hit the scene as Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal.  After 4 years on that show, she won the role of Lindsay Bluth Funke on Arrested Development (great show), and is more recently famous for her marriage to Ellen DeGeneres.  Besides her nationality, I knew all this about her.  And even though I watched some of Ally McBeal and we own all of the seasons of Arrested Development, I didn't know the rest of her history. 

You can read the book to get all of it, but the gist of it is that she learned how to crash diet when she was 12 and started modeling.  Her mom taught her to eat 300 calories a day to lose a pound a day, and after her shoots she and her mom would binge on all the foods she'd missed during her diets.  From there her obsession with her weight and her relationship with food worsened.  As she became more famous, her drive to be thin increased, and she hired a nutritionist to help her learn how to lose weight and keep it off.  She took the tools given to her and twisted them to give her more extreme weight loss, and at one point she weighed a mere 82 pounds. 

De Rossi was frankly honest about her history, and gave the reader a realistic view into the mind of someone struggling from eating disorders.  She made it very clear that anorexia and bulimia are mental disorders, and that the words coming from loved ones to someone with a poor body image can often be blown out of proportion and turned into a sort of mantra that fuels their obsessive behavior.  Critics of the book have said that what her detailed narrative does is provide ideas for people with eating disorders, and that it will just create more problems.  I disagree.  I don't have an eating disorder, so I don't know it for a fact, but to me, what I saw was a very sick woman, and the last thing I wanted to do was become that obsessed. 

Clearly, she is rehabilitated, or she wouldn't have been able to write with the perspective she has now.  She spends time looking back at her life and discussing reasons people become obsessed with their appearance.  She also discusses her struggle with her sexuality, which isn't a subject I care to read about, but in this book, it is given as one of the reasons she became so determined to be perfect.  That part of the book didn't bother me, because I didn't feel like I was being asked to accept her lifestyle, and it wasn't the point of the book.  What I gained from the book was that becoming fixated on something, whether it be a number on the scale or the thickness of your arms or the amount of calories you put in your body, is unhealthy. 

The point is, if you've ever had any struggles with your own body image, or if you have a bad relationship with food, you should read this book.  I can honestly say it gave me a fresh perspective that has changed how I see myself and my relationship food.