Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, my review

Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Wow, what an amazing story. Portia de Rossi gives you an extremely personal view of a someone dealing with an eating disorder.

As she says in her book she didn't start out to be an anorexic, it just snuck up on her in the guise of a healthy diet and a professional attitude.

Her pursuit to be loved, admired and to feel worthy of her position as a TV star lead her down a path of unhealthy eating and an obsession with food and exercise. Her entire day, apart from about three - half days per week, was spent in the pursuit of counting calories, burning calories and trying to lose weight. She was obsessed with food. She was obsessed with exercise.

The truly sad thing is that this way of thinking started when she was a young girl. As a 12 year old model she learned about binging/purging, starving and ways to lose pounds in preparation for a shoot.

She has to win and be the best at everything. That meant that being a size 8 when all the sample sizes were size 6 wasn't good enough. She had to be perfect and fit into the sample sizes. If a size 6 was good then a size 4 was better. If people were thinner than her then she wasn't thin enough. She was obsessed with being good enough.

This paragraph really struck me:

"I don't now where this pressure came from. I can't blame my parents because it has always felt internal. Like any other parent, my mother celebrated the A grades and the less-than-A grades she felt there was no need tell anybody about. But not acknowledging the effort that ended in a less than perfect result impacted me as a child. If I didn't win, then we wouldn't tell anyone that I had even competed to save us the embarrassment of acknowledging that someone else was better. Keeping the secret made me think that losing was something to be ashamed of, and that unless I was sure I was going to be the champion, there was no point in trying. And there was certainly no point to just having fun."

This was very fast read for me because the story was so compelling and unbelievably interesting. It is amazing that a woman who seemingly had everything, beauty, fame, wealth, felt like she was nothing.

If you want to see what goes on inside the head of someone with an eating disorder, you should read this book.

If you want to learn some of the signs of an eating disorder, you should read this book.

If you just want to read a compelling story, you should read this book.



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