Kate Spicer – Honestly Showing us the Ugly Side of Weight Loss
Last week I watched a BBC program called “Super Skinny Me” and I related to it much more than I’d care to admit. In it, two British journalists agreed to spend five weeks doing whatever they had to do to reach the mythical size zero. I should mention here that both of them were very healthy and attractive women before they ever started their weight loss journeys. The one journalist I related to most was Kate Spicer. She is 38, 5’8″ tall and weighed 140 pounds. That weight is perfectly healthy for a woman that height. In fact, it is a weight that many of us aspire to but Kate set out to lose weight at all costs and watching her do some of the things I have done in my lifetime was very scary.
She started with the Master Cleanse, not as a cleanse but as a weight loss method. When she determined that the Master Cleanse wasn’t enough, she had daily enemas and colonics. Watching her weigh herself was heartbreaking. She’d become consumed by the experiment and grew to have that crazed, desperate look in her eyes that I’d seen in my own many times before. At one point, she stepped on a scale after a colonic and discovered that she had lost something like three and a half pounds. Rather than the joy many healthy people would expect to see, she was very reserved about it. I knew, from my own experience that she was thinking something along the lines of “It is nothing. It isn’t enough. I need more.”
Kate eventually gave in to the hunger and gave up the Master Cleanse. After the enemas and colonics, she went to fruit, vegetables and steamed fish. She also exercised twice a day to burn off the tiny bit of calories she consumed. Eventually, she slipped into the dark abyss of bulimia. Throughout it all, she leaned on smoking and even began smoking more as her dieting became more desperate. It was like watching the first half of my life condensed into a one-hour program.
I saw her drawn face, grey skin and dull eyes and my heart went out to her. I saw her try to lie to the doctor about her bulimic tendencies and remembered being in the same position at one point in my life. Thankfully, Kate had a doctor monitoring her who understood that she needed to be pulled out of the experiment.
In an article she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Kate says:
“About 1 percent of Americans have bulimia. Twice as many, including 30 percent 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.”
This is true. While Kate did this as an experiment and had a doctor and producers to pull her out of the dieting tailspin she was in, most women don’t have people to do that for them. While moderate diet and exercise for the sake of good health are a good thing, drastic dieting to the point of starvation and exercise to the point of overtraining are self-destructive and abusive behaviors that can only lead to a bad end. If you have the opportunity to see “Super Skinny Me” on BBC America, please do. Everyone should be aware of the issues and dangers that so many of their friends face – alone.
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