Superskinny me : the race to size double 00

Super skinny Me: The race to size double 00

Channel 4 documentary 

While flicking through the endless selection of programmes on sky, and still finding nothing to relieve my boredom, I flick onto the lifestyle section where I am usually amused by something.  As I page down feeling depressed about the fact that I’m going to have to succumb to watching a repeat of “The Hills” I stumbled across a documentary channel called “Current TV”, but what really sparked my interest was the programme it was showing “Super skinny me: the race to size double 00”. Bright eyed, and awake I “info-ed” the programme eager to find out about the documentary. Unfortunately I missed the first episode of the three part documentary but was glad I tuned in at the time I did! 

The documentary followed two journalists as they throw themselves into a world of extreme dieting.  Both of the women started off with average BMI’s and at a healthy size 12, yet their aim was to drop a shocking five dress sizes in five weeks, something that to me seemed impossible, and why are they doing this I hear you scream? Yes, that’s right to achieve the epic, infamous size 00; a girl of age 8 years old’s measurements.

As I did not catch the first part of the documentary, afterwards I leapt onto the computer to find that someone had thoughtfully put the first few sections on the legendary you tube! To start with I only began watching the documentary out of pure enjoyment and to relieve my Saturday night boredom, yet it was clear to me after the first few minutes that this documentary suited my research due to it being filmed around the time of the “Size zero” debate and when all of the fashion industries secretly let underweight, unhealthy girls parade the catwalk, until the media attacked the topic and the body obsession began…. 

It is estimated that women spend about 31 years of their life trying to loose weight and on a diet, an extremely depressing fact to start the documentary with, but why do we feel the need to always be constantly thinner? Personally I feel it is because of the constant pressure and the images that are forced in front of our faces on a day to day basis. Whether it’s in a car passing endless beautiful billboard with women with goddess like figures promoting Special K, or on the television watching live from the red carpet premieres, with starts claiming that “it’s all down to a health diet, and a little exercise.” I’m sorry Miss Beyonce Knowles but that certainly is not true! For example we all know you took part in the Cayenne Pepper and Maple Syrup cleanse, along with a series of colonics. Yet what I didn’t realise was how weak and emotionally unstable you would have felt. This was clear on the documentary as one of the journalists tried out this so called “detox”. Kate became drained of energy, emotionally unstable, weak, and unable to focus mentally. 

Both of the journalists took part in the show to highlight all of the nasty side effects that extreme diets can do to your body. Kate really wanted to experience the mental side of the dieting and how woman who go through these extreme diets really feel. 

Within five minutes of the documentary Louise was filmed flicking through a series of magazines for inspiration and diet tips. This showed me how gravitated the media are around the topic, as instantly Louise found out about how Elizabeth Hurley gets her figure and that she goes “through hell.” Hardly motivational? Yet it then went onto say that Nicole Richie was back on the “Burger diet”,  which shocked me as how does she look so emaciated yet claim to be on a burger diet….? For me this seems unclear, false information, given by the great know-it-all media, read daily by teenage girls. 

One of the first diets Kate induced was based purely on liquid, cutting out food all together. This alarmed me as firstly I could not imagine living without consuming proper, wholesome food, and secondly surely the body cannot either? I have read magazines claiming that these liquid fast diets really “do work” and “deep cleanse” your body, but they also must be depriving the body of essential food groups, vitamins, minerals and surely energy. Consuming a mere 230 calories on “The Lemonade diet” seems to me like you are literally squeezing your own grave out of lemons, it is 90% less of a normal daily calorie intake, on top of this she ran for an hour a day, utterly insane.  

Louise’s first diet was not as extreme, but still severely limited her daily calorie in take. The “Just say no diet” states that you should say no to dairy, no to carbs after lunch, no to alcohol, and of corse say no to sugar. The diet advises working out regularly to ensure maximum weight loss. 

After the first week Kate lost a huge 7lbs, on the lemonade diet, and Louise also lost exactly the same amount. Such a huge weight loss in such a short amount of time is generally considered unhealthy and unnatural and with many juice diets and slim fast diets, the weight rapidly creeps back on, and can leave you even over-eating and gaining weight as your body is so hungry from the week without barely any real nutrients or actual food. Yet the media and advertising constantly remind us that diets such as “the lemonade diet” and “slimfast” achieve great results in one week, yes they do, but are they really healthy and will you really maintain this weight in the long run? For me the answer is obvious and a huge no.  I have even seen this happen in family and friends around me, a month during the diet they look slim and dropped around a stone yet a few months water the weight has crept on and with a few extra pounds added on top. Excited yet apprehensive for the girls health and concentration levels I watched on to find out how they where going to get through the second week and what diet they will be testing. 

Next Kate crazily checked herself into a detox centre in Hampshire, or what I saw as a prison. At the centre she would receive three juices a day and be allowed a broth along with two colonics in the week. Yet this crazy centre was nothing compared to the ridiculous “Watercress soup diet” carried out by Louise. Made famous by the likes of Elizabeth Hurley, it grantees instant weight loss. Personally I would rather live on a normal, healthy, diet instead of three bowls of watercress soup for the rest of my life. Yet again the media encourage us to participate in these extreme diets, in a promise that we will look like Elizabeth Hurley, to be honest I’ll pass on that one…

The side effects that these girls encounter seem hardly worth all of the trouble of the diets. After just one lunch of the new diet Louise experiences her tongue swelling with a white and green scum type coating, she also states that her relationship would end and her life would be very hard to cope with if she carried on with this type of extreme dieting for the rest of her life. 

Back in the detox clinic Kate is still enduring a vigorous exercise regime, meaning that soon enough her body will turn to feeding on her muscles for energy. This race to size double zero, seems to be excruciatingly painful from the look on Kate’s face when working out with her personal trainer. If the media carry on promoting and advertising these quick fix diets, then surely teenage girls and boys will be experience early osteoporosis, muscle fatigue, loose their concentration in the classroom and even experience premature death, something which seems to me as a huge problem. What scares me the most, is that these diets may lead to severe heart problems, a key medical problem associated even with death in severe anorexics, due to the low levels of minerals and nutrients leading to electrolyte imbalance, furthermore dangerous irregular heartbeats may also happen as an effect of depriving the body of food and exercising to an excessive extent. The media never seem to bring this to light, they only publish what diets these A-listers are on, and how amazing they look a whole stone lighter, but really underneath they must be feeling tired, stressed, and anxious and may even experience some of the side effects that are shown in this documentary.  I feel that the media are not telling us the real story and the real outcomes of these drastic diets, and that they are just trying to fabricate them and make them sound effective to the reader to ensure that next week they’ll come back and buy the next issue with the next part/recipe of the detox diet…

As the documentary went on I just became shocked and more shocked at the deplorable results and on-going side effects of the diets. Kate lost a huge stone in two weeks, which is a huge and usually unachievable amount; it appeared that Kate seemed to be the one mentally most affected by the diets. It showed me how easy it would be for a young girl of my age to be become obsessed by the diet they are on, and how easy it is to develop symptoms and experience the starting stage of an eating disorder. 

Looking at Kate going through the diets, it was clear that food became the only thing that she thought about, and I think it was purely because she was on a diet, and would have to constantly think about what she couldn’t eat and what she could do next to loose some more weight. Loosing weight over the three weeks appeared to be the only thing she could concentrate on during the documentary, everything she did revolved around her weight. This reinforced the obsessive behaviour that teenage girls may experience when on a diet like the ones the Kate and Louise took part in. Due to the protein shake diet, Louise had to devote herself to a punishing regime of 2 hours of exercise a day, causing tension to build up between her and her boyfriend. She said that she felt too tired in the evening to go out and socialise, if this is what is happening to teenage girls, no wonder they are left feeling alone, isolated and the percentage of teenage depression is on the rise, highlighting what to me seems like a clear link between eating disorders and depression. Additionally the documentary showed that every time the girls could not order anything from the menu, as it didn’t cater to their dietary needs, and the girls feared going out as they would have to resist the temptation.  For me this also shows that girls my age experiencing eating problems, may even feel threatened by the thought of going out with friends and family as they then have to look at a menu, consisting of “non-diet” items such as; “Burgers with fries” “Pasta with creamy carbonara” sauce, this for them may seem a hassle and disrupt their diet, so again they sit at home, almost imprisoned by their eating problem as they could never eat such calorific items for a dinner. This definitely is experienced by Kate as she goes on to say that “I feel as if I have been taken hostage” just purely by being on such a strict diet that limits her food choices and even takes over her social life. 

Interestingly Louise said that after watching a programme about eating disorders which described some of the symptoms such as always being cold, and the constant  battle with food, she felt that she herself could definitely associate with the problems that the people discussed on the programme, and that she felt that she was even dealing with an eating disorder. Her obsessive behaviour to exercise seemed insane, as she felt that she had to clock up 2 hours each day, otherwise she felt that she would gain weight instantly. If this is what teenagers are worrying about on a day to day basis and having such an obsessive behaviour with their weight, then are they really concentrating in lessons and are they really happy deep down?

A binge is described as the consumption of an excessive amount of food and when your feelings are raging out of control. Kate endures a binge on week 2 of her diet.  I have heard of ‘binge eating’ but to see someone actually endure one and for them to actually talk about what caused the binge and how they felt was eye-opening and quite horrific. Kate was out of control, and ate literally whatever she could get her hands on, even if the food tasted of nothing. Binge eating is very common in teenagers, as we experience a range of emotions on a day to day basis, and some people use it to cope with things from relationships to the pressure of exams. Usually after a binge, self induced vomiting usually happens, to get rid of all of the calories consumed in the short amount of time. Reading around this issue, I think that Kate experienced this binge as her body had been so starved and deprived of all of the elements of food that once she ate something, her body found thought that this might be the only chance of getting food for a while, making her over-eat so her body can keep the food to maintain survival. This is typical of people suffering from a disorder called a binge anorexic eating disorder, which again showed how easy it is to fall into this unhealthy cycle and experience early symptoms of an eating disorder. After seeing a doctor Kate said that she did not experience any vomiting after, yet at the end of the show when she is forced to quit the diet due to doctor’s advice she claims that she did experience self-induced vomiting a series of times. More than anything it is dis-heartening and frightfully sad to think about young teenage girls doing this to their young fragile bodies, just to meet the media’s definition of what they think is glamorous and acceptable. Kate playing around with laxatives was another scary thought as not only is it not effective in loosing any calories, it increases a frequency in your bowl, absorbing the nutrients high up in your small bowl which is disruptive to the body and very unhealthy.  

Louise carried on to loose weight, and got into a tiny pair of double 00 jeans at the end of the documentary, Kate was encouraged to stop the diet by her doctor and physiatrist as her obsessive behaviour around food was worrying, and she could of even developed bulimia. Her early experience with food started at school, as she was surrounded by boys and girls and found it to be very competitive, leading her to overeat and vomit, causing her weight to balloon. Kate talking about her food obsession starting in school, made it clear to me that competition between girls to look good and to gain attention may be one of the reasons why they start playing around with diets and exercises, and where are they getting the information for this from that is easy for them to access? Bingo, the media, which take hold of billboards, magazines and sprawl them across the internet! 

Both of the girls definitely threw themselves into the experiment; this was shown emotionally and from the results at the end, as Louise buttoned up her size 00 jeans. I found it painful to watch the two women induce these potentially life threatening diets, as it really did show you the awful emotions they experienced. Their social lives ended, their concentration and work levels dropped, - Louise’s boss said that she would consider firing her if she carried on with the extreme level of dieting, as her work ethos deteriorated.  What shocked me the most was how easy it was for both of the journalists to become obsessed and controlled by food, it was scary to think that girls around the country could be feeling like this on a day to day basis, just because they have picked up diet information on the internet, or by flicking through a magazine. Louise reached the end result of reaching the famous size double 00 jeans, but at potentially life-ruining rate.  This programme showed me that many of the diets shown in the media are very extreme, and should definitely not be undertaken by girls around my age, as they destroy you mentally and physically. I personally don’t even think they should be undertaken by many of the celebrities as they leave your body deprived of many essential nutrients. 

WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY HERE