Portia de Rossi conquers anorexia, accepts herself

It was early in her acting career, but already Portia de Rossi seemed to have it all. The Australian actress, who'd begun her life in the spotlight as a model at age 12, landed a role in 1998 on the hit ABC series "Ally McBeal" at age 25, and was cast in a leading role in a major motion picture only two years later. Tall and slender, with a mane of blond hair, she looked on the outside to have an ideal life.

On the inside, it was anything but.

In 2000, she collapsed on the set of "Who is Cletis Tout?" At 5 feet 8, she weighed 82 pounds, the result of a regimen in which she ate only 300 calories a day and exercised unrelentingly.

She was hiding a secret she thought would ruin her career prospects - that she was a lesbian - and was ashamed of her lie. She thought if she were thinner, she'd be more beautiful, more accepted and more successful.

Instead, she came close to organ failure and was diagnosed with osteoporosis and lupus. Her eating disorder yo-yoed in the other direction, and 10 months later, she weighed 168 pounds. She found equilibrium with friends' support and therapy at Malibu's Monte Nido treatment center.

Now, the 37-year-old actress, who weighs 130 pounds, has written a memoir, "Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain" (Atria Books, 308 pages).

In excruciating detail, she lays bare the thought processes driving her anorexia, the rituals she developed around eating food and the intense feelings of worthlessness she couldn't shake.

It was cathartic, she said, to explore why she turned to anorexia.

"I wanted to starve away my sexuality," she said in a 40-minute phone interview from the farm outside Los Angeles where she spends weekends with her wife, Ellen DeGeneres.

"I wanted to disappear. I didn't want to be attractive. Once I realized that starving would lead to sickness and possibly even death, I thought I could disappear just as easily being overweight as underweight."

She was concerned the book's revelations might spur copycat behavior, but went ahead anyway.

"I felt like if I was going to tell the story, I had to be 100 percent honest about it," she said. "I wanted people to understand what it's like in the mind of a person with an eating disorder. From the outside, it can seem strange. In fact, it's a logical progression that starts with the best of intentions - being healthy, the best you can possibly be. It takes a turn somewhere."

Molding herself as a model

De Rossi, born Amanda Rogers, was a straight-A student who wanted to excel in everything. She started modeling at age 12 to make herself "feel attractive," but it did the opposite.

"I had individual body parts being compared to other girls'," she said. "Everything was a contest."

She started bingeing and purging to mold herself to the shape clients wanted. Fearful that her real name was "too ordinary," she changed it at 15 to something "more exotic." At 18, she realized she was a lesbian. She tried to change that, too.

De Rossi went to law school briefly, then became an actress and moved to Los Angeles, where she was married briefly to a man.

When she won the role of Nelle Porter on "Ally McBeal," her time on the treadmill - literally, not figuratively - began.

In the morning, she'd run 60 minutes at an eight-minute, 34-second mile pace. Her breakfast was 60 calories worth of plain oatmeal, sprinkled with Splenda and misted with butter-flavored cooking spray. She skipped lunch and ran again on a treadmill in her dressing room with a fan blowing her face to keep her makeup dry.

Dinner consisted of 2 ounces of tuna (from a 6-ounce can divided in thirds) eaten with chopsticks in tiny bites. She smoked after eating to help feel full.

But her insecurity was running high. One day, she cried after eating 6 ounces of yogurt instead of the 2 ounces she'd allotted. She writes: