Yo-yo is an inaccurate way to describe weight fluctuation. It is not the term anyone would use to describe the highs and lows that were the basis of my self-esteem. Yo-yo sounds frivolous, childish, disrespectful. Yo-yo sounds like a thing outside of yourself that you can just decide to put away and not pick up anymore. It suggests that there are end points, predetermined stopping points where the highs and lows end, because the string of a yo-yo is a certain length that never changes. My “bottom” would always be 140 pounds, my “high” 115. But it isn’t like that. There’s nothing predetermined about gaining and losing weight. Every day of my life I woke up not knowing if it would be a day on the path to a new bottom, a new big number that I’d never before seen on the scale, or if I would have a good day, a day that set me on the way to success and happiness and complete self-satisfaction. Since I was a twelve-year-old girl taking pictures in my front yard to submit to modeling agencies, I’d never known a day where my weight wasn’t the determining factor for my self-esteem. My weight was my mood, and the more effort I put into starving myself to get it to an acceptable level, the more satisfaction I would feel as the restriction and the denial built into an incredible sense of accomplishment.
After introducing me to the calorie counter, Suzanne was all business. As well as teaching me how to count calories, she taught me to weigh my food. She told me that portion size was very important and to ensure I was getting the right portions, I had to buy a kitchen scale. She told me what to put on that scale for which meals. She told me that I should eat six small protein-enriched meals a day. She told me to keep a journal of what I ate.
Chicken, turkey, orange roughy, tuna, egg whites, oatmeal, blueberries, nonfat plain yogurt, steamed vegetables, brown rice, wheat bread, bran muffins, nuts—all weighed and documented—were my stable of foods I was allowed to eat. Most other things were not part of the program.
As I left her house that day I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I had heard that in order to know how to overcome difficulties, you needed the “tools” to do it. Suzanne had given me a program with tools. A no-fail system of calorie counting, weighing, and adding up my daily intake so there would be no guesswork to my weight loss. Now that I had my curriculum in the form of my “allowed” foods, homework assignments in the form of a diary, and weekly exams when Suzanne would evaluate how I’d performed, I could be a good student.
11
I WAS OFFERED the cover of Shape. Shape is a health and fitness magazine that depicts lean, physically strong women. Its articles explain the secret to killer abs and each month it unveils the no-fail diet. On the cover it displays a fit woman, a celebrity if they can get one, who promises to tell you her strategy for weight-loss success. They take pictures of their cover girls in skimpy outfits, like a bikini or spandex shorts, and then interview them about how they achieved optimum “health.” I knew why they picked me. It wasn’t for my lithe body or killer abs, and they certainly didn’t see the underwear scene before offering it to me. I was simply the new girl on the hot TV show. I doubted anyone making the decision had even seen me on the show. Of course, I panicked and gave a million reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but my publicist and manager thought it was a great opportunity. A cover is a cover.
It was hard to argue with my publicist and manager. My publicist and manager knew better than I did. The cover of Shape complemented the clean-living, fresh-faced image they were trying hard to create. They had subtly written a character for me to play in public, gently coercing me to play the role of an ingénue, fresh but glamorous and with an ounce of naïveté. They guided me into the character by favoring romantic dresses over sexy dresses for red carpet events and to most questions about the show or my life, they smiled with approval when I answered that my journey from law student to Hollywood actress was “a dream come true.” It seemed effortless and surprising: a Cinderella story. I understood their reasoning. I needed an image to sell; the truth of who I was needed to remain a secret and Portia, the young, heterosexual, self-confident Australian actress needed to emerge. Besides, most of the successful, leading-lady actresses had graduated from this rite of passage. However, the ingénue was a difficult role for me to play—more difficult in fact than a commanding, self-assured attorney. Even if I ignored the fact that I was gay, at twenty-five I was too old, too cynical. I played the ingénue once in Sirens when I was twenty, and even then I felt more like Dorothy Parker than the character of Giddy, the gullible artist’s model.
I didn’t know how to play that character for the Shape interview. With neither health nor fitness being of interest to me, I didn’t know what to talk about. How could I possibly explain my weight maintenance when it was attributed to starving and bingeing?SHAPE: Portia, tell us how you stay in shape?PORTIA: I eat three hundred calories a day for as many days as I can before a photo shoot. The rest of the time I binge and purge.SHAPE: What’s your favorite workout?PORTIA: I’m afraid to work out at all because I’m worried that muscle definition makes people look bigger. I hate the look of fit, muscular women. I prefer the long, waiflike look of models who are most likely just as sick as I am.
Suzanne had stopped me from crash dieting. It was a cycle of loss and gain, she explained, that once started, could never be stopped. It was true. After shooting the scene in my underwear I had gained a lot of weight. Reluctantly and fearfully, I put my new diet into practice for the week leading up to shooting the cover of Shape. I was extremely nervous that because I’d not starved myself the way I usually did before a shoot, my body wasn’t really in good enough shape to grace the Shape cover. Walking into my trailer that was sitting atop a hill at the location they’d chosen for the shoot, I felt unprepared and anxious. I had weighed in at 125 pounds that morning—not a number on the scale I was used to seeing the morning of a photo shoot, much less a cover shoot wearing a bikini. I had already eaten, too, another abnormality before a shoot. I had eaten my individually packaged oatmeal sachet with antioxidant blueberries and Splenda, a sugar substitute that Suzanne said was so healthy she gave it to her baby. Although I knew that I was being a good student and following the only program that had a chance of actually working for me, the guilt and unworthiness I felt by not starving myself in preparation for the shoot were unbearable. I was embarrassed to shake the hands of the picture editor and the executive editor of Shape. I was ashamed that even though I had a gym membership, I rarely used it. Although I’d never really liked the “fit” look, I wished that I could drop my robe to reveal muscular arms and legs and a defined abdomen and waist. I was dreading dropping my robe and showing them the exact opposite of what I knew they were expecting to see. During the shoot, and in a fit of insecurity, I asked one of the photographer’s assistants, an unattractive guy who looked sandy and sunburned, like he’d spent the morning surfing, how my body compared to the other girls who’d modeled for the cover. I’d been watching him all morning, not because he was interesting, but because he looked so bored, so uninspired by working on photo shoots, or perhaps this shoot in particular. He was the perfect person to ask because I knew he’d answer with complete honesty. He wouldn’t care if he hurt a girl’s feelings. His expression changed the second I asked the question, as if the question were like a plug inserted into his brain that reanimated him and sent energy flooding to his face. With a big, dumb smile he responded slowly, giving more weight to each word than was necessary to make the point. “We photograph some women with really sick bodies.”