They are what they don’t eat

There is a tribe of women who exist on the edges of starvation despite living well above the poverty line; while rich in handbags, they are poor in diet, eating as little as a pitiable victim scrabbling for food in war- and drought-torn corners of Africa. It was the state of mind of this privileged yet skeletal few that I sought to understand in the documentary “Superskinny Me,” in which I immersed myself in the culture of thinness. I joined the world of women who live on the fringes of an eating disorder in order to fit into that most coveted of red-carpet dress sizes: the mythic size zero.

I was fairly sure I couldn’t get to a zero; my bones are simply too big. I’m a fit and healthy 38-year-old, 140-pound, 5-foot-8 journalist and restaurant critic. But for the project, I would try to get myself camera-ready slim, to get that look of fatless, worked-out, sinewy flesh -- a look I call “the acceptable face of eating disorders” -- by dropping down to 120 pounds.

I started with the Master Cleanse diet, drinking nothing but a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper and blasting my bowels with two pints of saltwater daily. Then I went to a “fasting and detox” center for daily enemas and colonics and exercised feebly twice a day, yet I couldn’t sleep for the hunger. Then I lived on fruit, vegetables and steamed fish. To sum up, for four weeks I ate little and smoked a lot.

The psychopathology of my immersion was intense and real; the more weight I lost, the more I wanted to lose. Progressing toward a physical ideal was empowering. London girls like myself -- but you can insert Paris, New York, L.A. or anywhere fashion and media have a fierce grip -- are especially prey to dieting culture. For ambitious perfectionists, being thin is the literal embodiment of success.

Withdrawing food and imposing harsh rules around its consumption -- as many trainers, cranky nutritionists and doctors will -- does strange things to brain chemistry. A combination of hunger and pouring my entire self-worth into the figures on the scales was to the total detriment of my more intangible qualities, such as intelligence, humor and sex appeal. My editor at London’s Sunday Times said that I became “weird and distant.” Exhausted, I stopped socializing and went to bed like a child at 9 p.m.

At one point, famished after a foodless flight to Miami, I sat in the car with my head swimming on the way to interview Mischa Barton. I asked one of the crew who had been shooting the lithe young star what she was like. With a depressing poignancy, he said she “has a kind of heavy lower body.” Mischa Barton, heavy?

In Miami, three weeks into the experiment and tired and depressed, things started to go wrong. I ate more than my regime dictated and ended up purging with laxatives. I’d gone native, become personally caught up in that strange combination of low self-esteem and great arrogance that exists among slender people. I became attached to feeling my bones as I lay in bed in the morning.

But I was displaying bulimic tendencies. Having lost about 16 pounds in three weeks, my body was now very hungry indeed. Every time I ate more than I thought was good -- bingeing -- I started purging by vomiting. Dr. Carel Le Roux, a metabolic specialist from London’s Imperial College who guided this experiment, says you can only fool the body into letting go of weight if you lose it at a crippled snail’s pace -- no more than half a pound a week. That requires cutting, depending on your metabolic rate, only 1,500 calories off your weekly nutritional needs. I was cutting about 8,000 calories a week, and my primal animal instinct was to binge. When the doctor discovered my disordered behavior, he said matter-of-factly that it was normal pathology in someone who has been starved, and he pulled me off the diet immediately.

About 1% of Americans have bulimia. Twice as many, including 30% of women who seek treatment for weight loss, suffer from the lesser-recognized binge-eating disorder (amnesiac bulimia, if you like: bingeing and forgetting to throw up). Personally, in my quest to be skin and bone, I would have gone further -- started taking diet pills and training a lot harder. But the documentary’s producers felt duty-bound to insist that I stop. This was frustrating and would not have happened in real life.

I did the rounds of the U.S. morning TV shows last week before the documentary aired on BBC America. I was interviewed by respected female anchors eager to sensationalize the horrors of my experience, while off-screen they admitted that they too had lived on watercress soup or the foul Master Cleanse juice. Some people are naturally skinny. Many others admit that they have to work hard at it. After my brief but torturous glimpse into their world, I pity them. Those women who choose to make skinniness their main asset are really only living half a life.