jello and diet

hey you shan larter here. today’s videois all about portia de rossi’s new book “unbearable lightness”. it’s a verypersonal account of her own struggle with anorexia and bulimia that she went throughfor many many years. it’s a very real book, it has a lot of raw details. and my hope isthat those of you who are still suffering will not run out and buy this book with theintention of using tips or tricks from portia’s

jello and diet, struggle to make your own eating disordermore toxic. i really hope and pray that when you read this book that you will see the wisdombehind what portia has figured out over the course of her journey and that you will takeaction steps in your own life to seek freedom from your eating disorder.

so before i talk to you about what i thoughtabout portia’s book, portia i just wanted to send you a little message because i knowyou watch all my videos. i just wanted to say that i am really really proud of you forwriting this book. it is very honest. i am sure a lot of the things you wrote in thisbook were very difficult to write and even more difficult to live. and i think it’s really important that you’vewritten this book because i am sure there will be other women out there who will belike myself where when i was in the deepest darkest pit of my eating disorder, that wasthe time when ally mcbeal was really popular on television.

and i mean i watched the show before you startedon it, but when you came on the show i was like wow, portia i just was in total awe ofyou. i thought you were just the most beautiful woman, you carried yourself so well, and youwere of course very thin, which is what i wanted to be. i used to get really upset withmyself. why can’t i be as thin as portia, what am i doing wrong? this obviously canbe done because you’re doing it so what’s wrong with me, what’s defective about me,why do i not get it? and so i think that there will be other womenout there who punish themselves for not being able to measure up to the standard that youwere portraying on that show and now for me to be able to read this and really see thatin order to achieve that look you were just

as sick as i was. thank you so much for being honest about thatbecause i think it will be very liberating to many women and it was also very liberatingfor me and i wanted to say thank you. now onto what i thought of portia’s book. i identified with a lot of things in portia’sbook. one of the things that was really striking to me is i think sometimes we put our celebritieson a pedestal. we almost think that they are sort of impervious to the same difficultiesthat we have. almost like they are super-human people and they wouldn’t be bothered withthis or that, like their lives are so different and the way they see the world is so different.but a lot of the things that portia struggled

with that she reveals in her book were exactlythe same things that i struggled with and i bet they are exactly the same things thatyou struggle with. one of the things she mentions in her bookis when she would look at the mannequins when she would go to a movie or television showfitting, and she would see the mannequins and she would think to herself “that isthe image of ideal beauty and i have to look like that.” and when she had the chanceshe would take out a measuring tape and she would measure thighs, measure their arms,measure their waists, and she would try and see how far off her measurements were fromthe mannequins and that would serve just to propel her forward to just lose a little moreweight and get a little closer to the ideal

body shape. another thing that i read in portia’s bookwhich made me totally ball because it was just hitting so close to home it really broughtme back to a dark point in my life when i was really suffering because i shared exactlythe same morning ritual as portia did. you know she describes just coming into consciousnessin the morning, she’s not even awake yet and she’s already thinking to herself: “whatdid i eat yesterday? did i binge? did i purge? did i slip up? did i eat something that wasn’ton my safe foods list? what do i have to do today to make up for yesterday? what exercisedid i do?” you know all that sort of running through your mind, all the mistakes that youmade, all the ways you have to make up for

it. and at the same time you’re runningthrough your mind with all that stuff, you’re feeling your body. she talks about feelingher ribs, are they sticking out? feeling her hip bones to make sure they were still stickingout, and her breasts, and just everything on her body just to make sure that she leftit exactly how it was the night before. i also had some of the same sickly ritualssurrounding food that portia describes in her book. having that small list of safe foodsthat you allow yourself to eat and the one bowl, the one plate and the one glass thatyou like to use because there is some way that you like to measure out your portionsize, or maybe its always the bowl that you like to eat before you purge. you know weget these kind of ritualistic attachments

to certain utensils. portia also loved some of the toxic foodsthat i’ve been trying to teach you about over my last several videos. one of the thingsthat she really at all of the time was splenda. and as you know the main ingredient in splendais chlorine which has been scientifically proven to be linked to causing cancer. shealso sprayed a toxic chemical called “i can’t believe it’s not butter” all overher food to try and add flavor to it without adding calories. when in fact what she wasadding was chemicals, and it’s a total non-food. she also liked to eat things like low-caloriejello and diet coke. the problem with that is that those types of things are chalk fullof artificial sweeteners and as you’ve learned

in some of my previous videos artificial sweetenersmake you more hungry for food in general, and especially more hungry for sweet food.so it really is like fueling the fire for your sweet cravings and making it worse. portia talks about perfectionism a lot inher book and her struggle with needing to be perfect, and the best, and the one thateveryone looks up to. so many of us struggle with perfectionism. i think a lot of timeswe think that celebrities wouldn’t struggle with that type of thing because look at them,everyone loves them, they are in the spotlight. but i think a lot of times they have thispersona about them that they are handling it fine but inside they have those same insecuritiesthat we all have.

when portia describes how she was dismissedby some people, some very close people, to her in her life that she decided to take aleap and tell them that she was suffering from an eating disorder. i totally understandhow horrible that feels and i was really identifying about what portia wrote. she says that “sharingthat deep of a secret with someone takes a lot of courage and having disbelief thrownback in your face feels like ridicule. i totally understand how that feels. being dismissedis often something like “oh you’re just doing that to be different, or you just wantto have attention and that’s why you are saying that you have an eating disorder.”or my favorite one is “it’s just a phase you’re going through, i’m sure you’llget over it.”

another thing i’ve been teaching you inthe last few videos is that as you see the numbers on the scale going down and down anddown that eventually those numbers will stop going down no matter what you do. portia talksabout this in her book and how scary it is to get to that place. the reason that thathappens is because your metabolism slows down so much that it’s barely burning anything.so the amount of calories and food that you were actually eating in order to lose weight,you’ll have to eat even less than that eventually just to maintain your weight on the scale. this is what portia has to say about that:“losing weight was no longer exciting to me and maintaining it was hard. i was exhausted.my joints ached. i could not believe how unfit

i was considering how much i was working out.but what scared me the most was how little i had to eat to avoid gaining the weight allback. i ate three hundred calories a day and i was just maintaining. i felt trapped knowingthat i would have to continue to be this extreme just to maintain the body that i had starvedmyself to achieve. another thing to note in portia’s book isthat she describes even though her weight is going down and down and down on the scalethat the fat on her body is not disappearing. this is important for two reasons. one because obviously it highlights that wehave a distorted image of ourselves and that we see fat in greater quantities than it actuallyis on our body because of our eating disorders.

but the other thing that is important foryou to know, and this is something that i have gone through in a previous video, isthat when you don’t give your body enough fuel then your body has to look in other waysfor other sources of fuel to feed you. so i mean for instance, your brain needs a minimumof eight hundred to one thousand calories a day just to function properly. then on topof that you’ve got to get out of bed, you’ve got to walk around, you’ve got to talk topeople, you’ve got to breathe. all those things require calories. so when you’renot giving your body the calories it needs then it’s forced to eat your muscle to stayalive. so when you starve yourself your bone density gets less, your muscle disappearsfrom your body because its been metabolized,

and the only thing you’re left with is fat.and that can be a very scary place and a very triggering thing for a person with an eatingdisorder. portia’s book is also very telling in theareas of the true root causes behind eating disorders. the feelings of being unloved,unworthy, not special, and like you don’t matter in this world. the reason that portia,myself and you struggle so much is because we mistakenly think that being skinny is somehowthe only value that we offer to this world. that’s the only way we see ourselves standingout or making our mark. i mean really think about that. is that how you want to be remembered? i can just see what my tombstone would haveread: shan’s skinny legs and tight butt

really added to the lives of everyone aroundher, she’ll be sorely missed. i mean come on! that is ridiculous! when i think aboutall the powerful, talented, incredible women in this world. portia, me, and you. and wheni think of us squandering our talents. it just makes me so angry that we would ridiculeourselves to such small thinking. portia credits naomi wolfe for her work inthe “beauty myth” in demystifying the current plague that society is foisting onwomen to look effortlessly beautiful in everything we do. naomi wolfe reveals that how starvingourselves to meet this beauty ideal means that we have to compromise our independence,our personal power and our quality of life. i totally agree with naomi and portia. wehave to stop squandering away our personal

power just to squeeze ourselves into a sizetwo dress. we are literally murdering ourselves. portia i am so glad you wrote this book, iloved reading it. i don’t agree with everything you wrote in your book. specifically i don’tagree that recovery from an eating disorder has to be a long drawn out difficult journeythat extends over many years before you are completely free from it. i totally see thatthat was your experience and so that is how you see recovery needs to be. but my experienceis actually that if you match the right coaching, with the right mindsets, tools and techniques,with a woman who wants freedom, then that road can be very short and permanent.

i am mostly grateful that you wrote this bookbecause i no longer see you as an effortless beauty at eighty-five pounds. and i thinkthat that myth needs to me demystified and i hope and pray that other actresses and modelswill follow in your footsteps and shed light on this very important issue. we could all use some of portia’s braverybecause one-hundred-percent freedom from eating disorders is only for those who are willingto take off their masks, stop living their

persona, discover their true selves, and livewith authenticity loving who they find because that is who you were created to be. thank you portia for writing “unbearablelightness” and thank you for watching this

video. i’ll see you on my blog. bye.