OK, I’ll admit it:  I can’t walk out of the grocery store without grabbing the latest issue of People or Us Weekly. I watch hundreds of movies and entire seasons of TV shows a year (thank you Netflix!). And I haven’t missed a Golden Globe or Academy Awards’ ceremony since I was 9 years old.

But despite my Hollywood obsession, I’ve never been compelled to read any celebrity memoir, even though there are plenty dominating Amazon. That is, until now. For some reason, I just had to pick up a copy of Portia de Rossi’s memoir, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain. For me, there was something about the Ally McBeal-eating disorder-journey to finding love with Ellen combination that I found irresistible. But while the book didn’t disappoint—actually I couldn’t put it down—it honestly scared the hell out of me.

In this tell-all, de Rossi explains in brutally honest, explicit detail what it was like bingeing, purging, and starving herself while first breaking into the modeling world and, later, Hollywood. And while I’ve always been cognizant that plenty of actresses (if not most) take extreme measures to fit into their size 0 skinny jeans, for some reason reading about it shocked me.

At one point, de Rossi was eating only 300 calories a day but somehow also running 6 or more miles a day. She tells of one instance where she accidently ate too many pieces of gum while in the parking lot of her local mall. Realizing her horrible error of eating “mindlessly,” she immediately got out of her car and started doing sprints in the parking lot (in her high heels!!) to burn off the extra 60 calories she had consumed. She suffered from insomnia because her body was in so much pain from being deprived of fuel.

Though she was beautiful, famous, and seemingly had it all, de Rossi thought she was fat, pathetic, and certainly not worthy of any of her good fortune. She whittled her 5 ft. 8 ” body down to 82 pounds because maintaining such a weight, to her, was the only way she could accept herself. That was the only way she felt she could belong.

What scares me is that women like Portia de Rossi are our role models. Certainly not all actresses and runway superstars are truly anorexic like de Rossi was, but many are. They might tell us that they’re naturally skinny. Or they might say they maintain their figures by simply avoiding carbs, hiking in Orange County, and doing Pilates.

But de Rossi finally told the truth of what it really takes to look the way she did. And I applaud her for doing so. Celebrities seem to set our gauge of the perfect body type, and unfortunately too many women (and sadly, our daughters) try to follow suit. But if that’s what is really required—de Rossi said she developed cirrhosis of the liver and osteoporosis because of her eating and exercise regimen—then I’ll stick with a size 6 any day.

If only more of our so-called role models told the truth the way de Rossi has, maybe society would finally stop idealizing their emaciated bodies.