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Site: http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/283/index.jsp Becoming a size zero at any cost. That's the subject of Super Skinny Me, a mesmerizing BBC show where two attractive, normally sized women chase the paparazzi fueled dream of pasting size jeans over their bag of bones body. Over 5 weeks they follow one wacky weight loss scheme after another. A picture is worth a 1000 words and this TV show is worth a million words showing why starving yourself doesn't work. Your body fights rapid weight loss and your mind and body are the losers. Your Designer Diet drives this point home with the Minnesota Starvation Experiment described in Threat 2. The Power of Starvation Threat, but you can't beat seeing it live on TV with people you instantly relate to and grow to care about. You'll see attempts to burn calories by swimming in freezing cold water. Lemonade diets where you drink nothing but lemonade. Exercising hours each day. Enduring multiple colonics, confusing poop loss with weight loss. Protein shake diets. Juicing diets. Laxatives. Binging and purging. Smoking and diet Pepsi diets. Crazy crazy stuff, all to lose weight at any cost. The result? Two very stressed and unhappy women at the verge of mental and social breakdown. It's so sad to see these beautiful women slowly crumble as losing weight becomes the most important thing in their lives.
What is so shocking about the show is as you see how starving themselves ruins their lives. Physically they become weak, to the point they can't open some doors any more. They feel cold as their body starts shutting down to save calories. They become manic and mentally confused. Dark rings live under their eyes. Energy drains from their face. And you see how the obsession to lose weight takes over. Life becomes all about food. They constantly think of eating more food and stopping themselves from eating. Relationships become less and less important as food becomes more and more important.At the end of 5 weeks one women did fit into her size 0 dreams. The other woman had to stop the experiment early because she was becoming mentally unstable, but she did lose quite a bit of weight and came close to the size zero goal. At the end of five weeks they both ate and ate as if they could never eat enough. This is consistent with what happened in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. They gained their weight back, as most everyone does. But in the process they harmed their heart and probably lost a lot of muscle mass as the weight they gained was mostly fat and a lot of the weight they lost originally was fat. We talk more about the role of muscle in weight loss in Threat 17: The Growing Old Threat. The solution is to lose weight slowly so your body doesn't feel like it's being attacked. To do that you work backwards by figuring out how much weight you can safely lose each week and then creating strategies you need to reach your goal. Then your body won't feel like it needs to protect itself at your expense. We talk about how to do this in Chapter 13: The Designer Way. |
