I BOUGHT A treadmill and put it in my dressing room. That way I was able to run during my lunch break on the set. I also bought another treadmill and put it the guest bedroom in my new apartment. With two treadmills, I didn’t have an excuse not to work out. Because I had started to bring my Maltese dog, Bean, to the set with me, it was hard to get to the gym after work, and having a treadmill in my dressing room allowed me to run for the entire lunch hour instead of taking time out of my workout to drive to the gym and park. Although I hadn’t had exercise equipment in my dressing rooms prior to Ally McBeal, I didn’t invent the concept. Many of the cast members had them.
I got a nutritionist. Her name was Suzanne. I met her during a routine checkup at my gynecologist’s office. She worked out of a small office in the back a couple of days a week and helped women change their diets to decrease their weight and increase their fertility. My doctor introduced her to me after I’d complained about my inability to maintain my weight. I told him that there were weeks when I’d gain and lose seven pounds from one Sunday to the next. After doing tests for thyroid disease and other medical problems that might have explained my weight fluctuation, he decided that the fault lay with me, that I didn’t know how to eat. I agreed with him and hired Suzanne to be my nutritionist.
I loved the thought of having a nutritionist. It made me feel professional, like I was considering all aspects of my work in a thoughtful and serious way. Before my first session with Suzanne, I made the decision to do everything she said. Like a faithful disciple, I would follow her program without question the way a top athlete would drink raw eggs if his coach told him to. This was the kind of private, customized counseling I needed to be a working actress. Like a top athlete, I needed this kind of performance-enhancing guidance. I needed a coach. But mainly, I loved having a nutritionist because Courtney Thorne-Smith had one.
“Hi! Come on in. Mind the mess.” Suzanne was a tall, thin woman with a sharpness to her movements. She dressed blandly and conservatively and was almost sparrowlike with long, thin arms and bony hands that would dart back and forth. I wondered why a woman like that, who was naturally thin, would be drawn to nutrition. I knew there were reasons to be interested in food other than weight loss, but I couldn’t imagine those reasons being compelling enough to make nutrition your life. Instead of seeing her at the gynecologist’s office where we met, I met with Suzanne at her home in Brentwood. When we’d first met she was wearing a white lab coat, and although the meeting was brief, from behind a desk she seemed officious, judgmental, bossy. But a layer of expertise and officiousness was immediately removed just by stripping her of her white coat and placing her in a different setting, in her home with her child’s toys strewn about, her family in photographs looking at me. They were conservative-looking folk, poised to judge me for being so much fatter than she was. Then again, I felt they were judging her for being so messy. The fact that she was a black sheep made me feel a lot better.
“So from what the doctor tells me you have trouble maintaining your weight and knowing what to eat. Please know that you are one of millions of people who struggle with this, which is why people like me have a job!” Suzanne was no longer a skinny bird poised to judge me. She was caring and concerned. It was off-putting.
“Tell me why you think you can’t maintain a healthy weight.” She looked at me with kindness and openness, but there was a fragility to her that I found disarming, perhaps because I recognized a similar vulnerability in myself. Did she starve and binge and purge, too?
“Well . . .” I was surprisingly nervous. I really hadn’t planned on opening up to someone about my eating habits, and all of a sudden it seemed like no one else’s business. It seemed too personal. It seemed strange and a little idiotic to talk about food, like I was a five-year-old sitting cross-legged in a classroom learning about the five food groups.
“I don’t know. I guess I just never knew of a really good diet that I can do every day so my weight doesn’t fluctuate.”
“Well, Portia. I’m not going to teach you a diet, I’m going to teach you a way of life. We’ll talk about what you like to eat, and then I’ll devise an eating plan that will be healthy and help you lose weight.”
Sounds like a diet to me.
She talked and I listened. She had a lot to say about the kinds of calories one should eat, the value of lean protein, the dangers of too many carbohydrates, the difference between white and brown carbohydrates, and the importance of choosing the “right” fruits without a high sugar content.
“I like bananas. What about bananas?” Bananas were a staple in my “in-between” dieting phase. After starving myself by only eating 300 calories a day, I would often eat a slice of dry wheat bread with mashed banana.
“Well, Portia. Bananas are the most popular fruit, probably because they’re the most dense and caloric of the fruits, so you’ll have to be careful not to have them too often.”
That explained why my “in-between” diet packed on the pounds. Bananas. Of course, the only fruit I liked was the only fruit this big fat country likes. I’m so typical.
“What are your eating habits now?”
“Now? Well, unless I’m getting ready for something, like a photo shoot or a scene like I just did on Ally where I had to be in my underwear, I guess I eat pretty normally. But you know, with the occasional binge.”
“What do you mean by ‘getting ready’? What do you do to ‘get ready’ for a photo shoot?” She leaned in slightly toward me. What I was saying seemed to intrigue her. I was wrong in thinking that maybe she starved, too.
“I eat three hundred calories a day for a week.” I was shocked to see that her eyes widened with disbelief as she registered the information. It made me angry. She was judging me.
After a pause, she asked, “What do you eat to make up the three hundred calories?”
“Dry bread, mainly. Crackers. Pickles. Mustard. Black coffee.”
“What happens when you’re done with the photo shoot?” She asked like she didn’t know the answer. It annoyed me.
“I binge, I guess. I eat all the foods I didn’t eat while I was dieting, and then sometimes I eat too much and well, you know . . .”
Should I continue? Should I tell this conservative woman who already looked slightly shocked by my eating habits that I vomited? She’s looking at me with anticipation and encouraged me to continue with a slight nod of her head. “I throw up.”
I could see that she was uncomfortable, but I felt compelled to continue. “If I feel like I haven’t thrown it all up, I’ll take twenty laxatives to make sure it’s all gone.” Why would dieting and throwing up be so surprising to her? Really, as a nutritionist, she should have heard all that before. It made me wonder if she was qualified to help me. Maybe she helped really fat people take off a little weight, not someone like me who really needed to be taught the “way of life” that she was pitching. It made me mad because I didn’t want to talk about myself and feel judged, I just wanted to learn about the five food groups like a five-year-old and take home a weekly eating plan.
I knew that I was being overly dramatic and that maybe she didn’t need to know about the purging, but her reaction to my eating habits embarrassed me and that’s what happens when I’m embarrassed. I get mad and I punish. And in response to my aggression, she leaned back in her chair and held a book up to her face, like a shield in between us.
“Have you seen one of these?” She waved it around. “It’s a calorie counter. It’ll help you figure out which are the healthy foods you can enjoy so that you’ll never have to feel like you need to do those kinds of things again.” Her eyes and her voice lowered as she lowered the book, her defenses. “Portia, it’s really important that you understand food and stop this unhealthy cycle of yo-yo dieting.”