Weight ain't nothin' but a number.

Since I hurt my back a couple of weeks ago, I've been watching a LOT of television to keep me busy. More than anyone should really watch in a day, but when you've got nothing else to do (I did read a few magazines), the television becomes your window to the world until you can get back out in it. And last night, that window had some pretty disturbing images.

One of the channels we get with our satellite is BBC America. I rarely watch it (except for when Graham Norton is on - he's hilarious), but the title of the show that was on caught my eye as I was searching for something to watch. The title was "Super Skinny Me", and it was a documentary about two English journalists who try to see if they can get to a size zero in 5 weeks. They were both average sized when they started - one was 129 pounds, one was 144 pounds. The goal of the film was to show how women often get carried away with losing weight and the scary things they resort to just to fit into a smaller numbered size.

During the first week, the one who started out weighing 129 pounds ate nothing but watercress soup for a week for every meal, and apparently, all it was made of was olive oil, onions and watercress. She had a heaping bowl of it 3 times a day. And nothing else. Yuck. The 144 pound one ate nothing but lemonade with maple syrup and cayenne pepper and exercised for an hour every day. Really scary stuff.

The second week, the 129 pounder drank 2 protein shakes a day and ate a high protein meal for dinner. And exercised for 2 hours every day. She consumed about 800 calories total and burned about 1200.

The 144 pounder went to a detox center and got colonics more times than she should have. She also started to become obsessed with food, and started experimenting with laxatives. When she confessed that she had started purging as well, the doctor monitoring her through this whole thing told her that she was on her way to becoming a bulimic if she wasn't careful.

The 129 pounder lost 14 pounds total and could fit into a size 00 jeans, the same size that would fit a 6 year old girl. Her rib cage started to show. Her collar bone was sticking out. It was appalling.

Thankfully, both of these women returned to normal once the experiment was over. The scary part of it for me was realizing that 2 years ago, while I was losing all of my weight, I too became obsessed with the number on the scale and the number on the tag of my jeans. I was smart enough not to let it get out of hand or do anything unhealthy or dangerous, but I knew exactly what kind of mentality these women had. It's a really frightening feeling when you let the clothes or the scale control what you eat or how you feel about yourself. Why is it that so many women tie their self-worth into their clothing size? I'm guilty of that, too. And perplexed at the same time.

I've been feeling really down over these last couple of weeks, what with not being able to exercise and being very restricted in my daily activities. I started feeling like I was gaining weight (which I wasn't), and started to worry. But after I watched that documentary last night, I felt like my eating patterns have really changed for the better over the past couple of years, and even though my scale might fluctuate, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at weight-wise. Of course, I'd like to drop a couple (and I do mean 2) pounds, but that's it. And I'm sure once I start up my regular exercise again (soon!), that it will come off. So I finally felt like it was OK not to worry about the scale anymore.

So watching TV for a week paid off a little bit.

OK, a lot.