Super Slim Me

WARNING – Angry rant below.


I feel compelled to vent my spleen. For anybody that has just missed the programme, Super Slim Me on BBC3, here’s a quick synopsis. A 5’8” and 10½ stone female who wants to go from a ‘curvy’ size 12 to a size 6, otherwise known as a USA size 0. She gave herself 8 weeks, on 500 calories per day, to do it in and enrolled a personal trainer, various quacks, as well as spending some time in Hollywood – for ‘thinsperation’. Given the nature of my very own quest to lose weight and the radical weight loss surgery (because, in my opinion ,weight loss surgery of all types is radical) that I have undertaken, it raised more than a few issues for me.



In my 20 years of yoyo dieting I have tried many of the ‘tricks in the book’ and I could certainly relate to what she was doing to herself in this piece of investigative journalism. Although, to be fair, more so when I was a teenager and in my early 20’s. I have been aware of the size 0 debate, especially when Madrid Fashion Week banned models with a BMI below 18, but I truly didn’t realise that young women were genuinely aspiring to be like these people. Certainly, when I have seen photos of Rachel Zoe and Nicole Ritchie, I’ve felt sorry for them as they looked so blatantly ugly. But, it is worrying that young women look at these ‘celebrities’ as style icons. I’ve watched Victoria Beckham go from a really pretty woman to something that, to me, looks grotesque. To me she is a joke. I know people are interested in her but I have thought it was more as a ‘freak-show’ than as genuine thinspiration.




How wrong can I be? The shops in Hollywood didn’t even have any clothes in stock over a UK size 6. I now realise there is pressure to be skinnier than the pressure when I was young but, I am utterly disgusted.



This intelligent, articulate, vivacious and utterly beautiful young woman transformed before my very eyes into a depressed, physically weak, socially withdrawn, and sunken eyed shadow of her former self. At times I thought she was verging on the incoherent, and in her own words admitted, “It’s like I’m drunk all the time”. What was more worrying was the Holistic Quack who told her she was obese. Obese? At 5’8” and 9 stone 12lbs? Funny that he managed to flog her a ton of vitamins and minerals, a long with his own book. He was simply abusing her, taking advantage and, frankly, messing with her head. (I appreciate she went to see him to highlight the ludicrous quackery but as she said, "what if it had been someone with a fluffy brain"?



My blood was boiling.



What struck me is not just the immediate impact that the size 0 fashion is having on the psyche of our youth but, more importantly, the long term damage that it has. We have a growing obesity epidemic, especially in our children and youths, add this to the pressure of not just getting down to a healthier weight but, the added pressure that, even if you do achieve a healthy weight it won’t be good enough. This is madness. When I was a teenage dieter, I started my first diet weighing 11 stone and with an idea that I wanted to be 9 stone. This was slightly higher than my, so-called, ‘ideal’ body weight. I didn’t have the pressures to be super skinny but the pressure to achieve a healthier body weight has resulted, for me, in a downward spiral of negativity, low self-esteem and finally morbid obesity. What are tomorrow’s adults going to be like? It’s a terrifying thought. Yes, I think there will be an increase in anorexia in a younger population (BBC3’s programme on teenage anorexia demonstrated a worrying trend already), by default of that there will be more deaths from the anorexia. But, what about the other demographic? The bulimics, the yoyo dieters and the binge eaters that are created? These are the people like me. These are the people who slip under the radar of services. These are the people who have years of chronic unhappiness and ill-health as a result of these maladaptive eating patterns. Is it just me or is the media missing the point? I think its naive of people to think only of the girls starving themselves in the here and now. What about all of the others who will enter this cycle of bingeing, over-eating and chronic low self-esteem at constantly failing to meet these ‘ideals’.



I appreciate just how easy it is to get sucked into these ideas. How many of us would love, secretly, to be really thin? I know that I would be elated at being 8 stone something. But I have told myself that my real goal is to get to a BMI of 24.9. For me, that means being 10 stone 3lbs. But frankly, I’ll be over the moon just to reach 11 stone. Ironically that is exactly the weight I was when I started all of this dieting.