Haliegh Sapp
Abnormal Psychology
Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, Portia de Rossi, 2010, Atria
Eating disorders are a uniquely western set of disorders, with most cases happening in
first world countries. Among those at risk for an eating disorder, adolescent girls are most likely
to develop some form of disordered eating. Most people agree that the unrealistic western
standards of beauty are a large part of this ongoing unhealthy relationship with food. For Portia
de Rossi, author of Unbearable Lightness, her problems with food began in adolescence as well,
and continued through her twenties. Her story is reminiscent of so many other stories of girls
trying to fit in and be ‘perfect,’ who end up taking it too far.
Portia’s story beings with her waking up in a panic over what she had eaten the night
before. She describes her panic as having the voice of a drill sergeant, always demanding her
attention, and bullying her into submission. The drill sergeant has been with Portia since she was
twelve, when she booked her first modeling job. The prologue goes on to describe the binging
episode that occurred the night before, when she binged on six ounces of yogurt. Portia describes
her real crime as not eating the yogurt, but instead it was her loss of self-control, fearing that she
would become fat, and worthless. The prologue ends with the words that haunt Portia throughout
the book, “When it’s quiet in my head like this, that’s when the voice doesn’t need to tell me
how pathetic I am… When it’s quiet like this, that’s when I truly hate myself.”
Portia de Rossi was born in Australia in 1973 as Amanda Rogers. She had two loving,
affluent parents, and an older brother to whom she was very close with. Amanda was a
competitive girl, always wanting to be the best at anything she did, whether it was dance, school,
or modeling. Doing something for fun was out of the question for her, anything she did was to
prove that she could do it, and if she wasn’t the best, then she worked until she was. This need
for dominance was only exacerbated after the death of her father when she was nine years old.
During her adolescence, Amanda attended a private school where most of the other kids
were from very wealthy families. While her family was fairly well-off themselves, she felt
average compared to her peers, and ‘average’ was one of Amanda’s most hated words. She
needed something that made her special, something other than money, she needed to stand out.
That’s when she decided to become a model. Even though she was young, only a twelve year old
girl at the time, Amanda sweet talked her way into a position at a local modeling agency. It
became clear to her very quickly that her body wasn’t good as it was then, she needed to be
thinner if she was going to make it. In a particularly memorable encounter with a casting agent,
Amanda found herself turned around facing the wall with her pants around her ankles. The agent
was inspecting her backside for flaws, the encounter ended with the agent saying “You have a
saggy butt for someone so young, do you work out?” The drill sergeant woke up then, and stayed
with her for more than ten years, telling her that she needed to do more work before she was
worth anything.
Amanda’s first brush with disordered eating habits was not very long after she decided to
become a model. Even though she felt as though she needed to lose weight, she began to binge
on junk food and candy bars. When she booked her first job she had gained several pounds, and
in order to lose that weight she cut her caloric intake to 2,000 calories over the course of 5 days.
This pattern of binging and purging stayed with her over the years, intensifying as time went on.
She spent her teenaged years surrounded by other models who swapped ‘diet’ tricks around, such
as the idea that smoking curbs the appetite, which is when she began to smoke as well. She
began to form dieting rituals before jobs, where she would only eat 300 calories a day for a week
to drop weight quickly. As her unhealthy eating habit grew, so did her career. By age fifteen,
Amanda Rogers had become Portia de Rossi, a successful model and budding actress.
Portia moved from Australia to Los Angles in her early twenties, after she dropped out of
law school to pursue acting full time. Within a few months of her arrival a serious blow to her
self-esteem occurred; her husband was divorcing her. While she felt robbed of the potential life
she could have lived with him, she was mostly upset that she finally had face the fact that she
was a lesbian. In the 1990’s being gay could have destroyed her career, a fact that forced her to
be in the closet, and a stressor in her life constantly. She avoided the issue by throwing herself
into her work, and within a few months she landed her first big role as a supporting actress on the
hit TV show Ally McBeal.
Portia’s career exploded, as did her popularity as the hot new actress on the scene. With
this new popularity came more stress and fear. The fear that she wasn’t thin enough intensified
her bingeing and purging habits. The fear that someone would find out that she was gay made
her more secretive, and less out going. She felt very awkward onset around her cast mates, and
very lonely in general in this time. She spent much of her time in her ‘happy place,’ fantasizing
about a romantic beach vacation with her childhood friend. After shooting her first season on the
show, she spent the summer living her fantasy, and subsequently being rejected. Because of this
rejection she binged the whole summer, and came back to the set significantly heavier than when
she left. When she showed up to a fitting for a commercial job that she had accepted and didn’t
fit into any of the clothes provided, Portia had a breakdown. This breakdown was the beginning
to a long battle with anorexia.
It began as an innocent enough diet. Portia began seeing a nutritionist, who taught her
‘good’ foods to eat and in what amounts. The nutritionist began her on a 1,400 calorie a day diet,
which Portia decreased on her own to 1,000 calories. She began weighing and prepping her food
on her own, accounting for each calorie in a food journal. She bought gym equipment for her
home and her trailer at work, and began to work out constantly. She saw results very quickly,
dropping from 130 pounds to 115 pounds within a matter of weeks. Everyone told her that she
was looking good and she got increased attention from magazines and the paparazzi, Portia was
doing the one thing she loved most; being successful at losing weight. By the time she hit 110
pounds, people were starting to become concerned.
Portia avoided mealtimes with other people, especially her brother, who also lived in Los
Angles. She knew that he would comment on what she ate, and began to avoid him altogether.
Her dieting continued, and when people told her that she was too thin, she would lie and say that
she knew, she was just stressed and planned on gaining a little weight back. Nothing was further
from the truth. She restricted her caloric intake even more, dropping from 1,000 calories a day, to
800, and finally to 300. Even though her nutritionist told her that she was at an unhealthy weight,
and should see someone for anorexia, Portia didn’t believe it. She felt as though she was too fat
to be considered anorexic. She worked out more zealously than ever, to the point of having
anxiety attacks that would only be calmed by running. By the time she flew home to Australia
that winter, Portia weighed only 95 pounds.
Understandably, Portia’s family was very concerned about her weight loss, and continued
to tell her so. Although she said that she understood and that she was going to gain some weight
back, Portia was angry on the inside. She felt as though they didn’t appreciate all of the hard
work that she put into losing weight, she felt as though she had finally ‘beaten’ being fat.
Throughout this time Portia maintained that she wasn’t very concerned with losing more weight,
she simply didn’t want to gain any weight back. She left home once again promising that she
would gain some weight, which was once again a lie.
By that summer she had landed her first role in a big movie, at that point only weighing
89 pounds. She stopped eating most food in general, replacing her calories with a glass of wine
at the end of the day. She started binging and purging with just wine as her only form of
sustenance. She began to have pain in her joints that left her crying and unable to move,
culminating in her collapsing on set where she was finally taken to a hospital, weighing in at 82
pounds. After receiving test results back that confirmed she had osteoporosis, dangerously low
electrolyte levels, and a misediagnosis of lupus, Portia finally began seeking treatment for her
disorder.
Treatment was hard for Portia. She was constantly battling with her fear of being fat,
even after gaining a healthy amount of weight. She went into remission, and quit going to
therapy. She began to binge and purge again, with long periods of binging. She went from being
82 pounds to 168 pounds in less than a year. Around this time she began to be honest with
herself, and her sexuality. She began to date women, even though she was still very in the closet
about it. She was in a long standing relationship with a woman when she truly began to get
better. She asked her naturally thin girlfriend how come she stayed so small, to which her
girlfriend said that she ate what she wanted, when she wanted. Portia began to adopt the same
thinking pattern, and after a while she became a vegan.
Portia says that she has a much healthier relationship with food now, and a much better
body image. She describes how she came to accept her body the way it was instead of imagining
of how she wanted it to be. She attributes her recovery to a lot of things, but mostly the loving
support of her family, and her wife that got her to where she is today.
Portia’s story follows the diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa
very closely. Like many others who suffer from these disorders, Portia’s symptoms began in
early adolescence. She had classic bingeing episodes where she would sit and eat all sorts of junk
food because she felt like if she could have it only in that moment, that she should eat a lot of it
so she wouldn’t want it in the future. After she ate as much as she could, she would force herself
to throw up as much of it as she could, and finish purging by taking multiple laxatives. If she had
a job coming up she would fast for days in advance, consuming way less than the recommended
calorie intake. She often weighed herself, with 130 pounds being her normal ‘fat’ weight and 115
being her goal weight. If she was too close to 130 pounds she felt worthless and average. Based
on this she fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa in the DSM-5, according to the
class text.
Portia was quite a bit older when she first developed anorexia nervosa. She severely
limited her caloric intake and increased her level of physical activity. She had an intense fear of
gaining weight and becoming fat, which she felt would make her worthless. She was severely
underweight, her lowest weight was 82 pounds. Even though she was extremely underweight she
still found flaws in her body, like “an inch of fat” on her belly or having “big, round thighs.” At
the beginning of her anorexia she was very methodical about her calorie intake, weighing and
measuring each bit of food she put in her body. Because of this she most likely had the
restricting type of anorexia at first. As she hit her lowest weight, she binged and purged glasses
of wine, eventually moving on to drinking whole bottles of wine and then vomiting them back
up. During the last months before her collapse Portia probably had the binge-eating/purging type
of anorexia nervosa, as per the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa in the DSM-5, according
to the class text.
This book was a shockingly honest recounting of the rise and fall of the course of a series
of eating disorders. Unbearable Lightness was a very hard book for me to read, but I am so glad
that I did. I suffered from an eating disorder when I was in middle/high school, and reading
someone else’s account of how it happened to them really put what happened to me in
perspective. When I first began reading I wondered if I had made the wrong choice in picking a
book about an eating disorder, but reading through to the end helped me see the value of writing
a memoir like this. An honest and relatable book like this can help call attention to a very serious
problem, and maybe help someone else out there who is currently battling an eating disorder not
feel so alone.
Because this book was so open and not sugar coated at all it gave valuable insight into the
thinking process of a person afflicted with an eating disorder. Understanding the thoughts that
spur on extreme weight loss or eating habits can help in the field of abnormal psychology by
being red flags for the onset of a disorder. Another helpful thing coming from this book is the
experiences Portia shared about her recovery, and the things that she was thinking, and things
she needed to learn or unlearn. Knowing more about the personal experiences of someone else
eating disorder helped me normalize it in a way that made me want to open up and speak about
it, which is helpful for me as I move forward when dealing with abnormal psychology.