super skinny journalists

Most of you have probably heard of Supersize Me, the documentary about the guy who eats only McDonalds for a month straight. Two nights ago on BBC America I came across a documentary that was basically the opposite of that. It's called Super Skinny Me, and it followed two female journalists, Kate Spicer and Louise Burke, in their five-week quest to get down to a size 0, while all along documenting the physical and emotional effects it has on them.

To begin with, the women were already in great physical shape (they both weighed around 130 pounds, if I remember correctly). To get their bodies down to a size 0 they underwent five weeks of extreme dieting and constant exercise. They were basically living the lifestyle that many real girls and women force themselves to live, just so they can be supermodel-thin.

Throughout the course of the 5 weeks, Kate and Louise not only became incredibly thin, but they also started to develop emotional problems. Although it was only an experiment, they actually started to believe they were fat, and they developed anxiety around food. Louise completed the experiment, and she ended up fitting into a size 0 (which is the size a normal 6-year-old girl would wear, according to the show) but she explained that the emotional and physical abuse she had been through was severe. Kate never finished the experiment because she was ordered by a doctor to stop a week early after she began developing signs of bulemia.

I found this documentary really interesting, because it kind of illustrated what a lot of young women put themselves through just to meet media and society's "standards" of what an attractive woman looks like. This documentary made me wonder how many female celebrities and models (and normal women, for that matter) live that lifestyle everyday, and how many suffer from emotional issues because of it...