If you followed the news at all this week, you know that the National Intelligence Estimate has determined that Iran’s nuclear threat is overblown, and if you followed the news more closely you probably know that Jennifer Love Hewitt is pissed. When photographs of Jennifer during a beach vacation surfaced on the Internet, accompanied by commentary about her weight gain (“We know what you ate last summer”), Ms. Hewitt retaliated, writing on her blog that she was proud of her body and saddened that so many other women obviously didn’t like theirs. “A size 2,” she proposed, “just isn’t fat!”
Whether Ms. Hewitt really is a size 2 seems, from the evidence, debatable. What she certainly isn’t is a size 0, the standard measure of Hollywood, any deviation from which ends up perversely looking, now, like a call to kelp shakes and Canyon Ranch.
The zero, a relatively new designation in apparel sizing, is the starting point of “Super Skinny Me,” the first of five linked documentaries about body image on “BBC America Reveals,” airing consecutive Sunday nights this holiday season. The show (shown last Sunday but available on BBC America On Demand) effectively deconstructs supposed what “professional dieting” actually entails.
When celebrities insist that they stay thin through restraint, grilled chicken, protein-rich meals and long walks in the Hollywood hills, they might as well be telling you that there is a new Tiffany’s store on Mars. The episode follows two journalists as they investigate what it takes to get to the infamous size 0. What they uncover is that it takes pain and suffering, subsisting on a lemon water diet and running on treadmills while covered in Saran Wrap in a sauna. A size 0 doesn’t mean getting by on 1,200 calories a day, but rather half that, as you perform at least an hour of cardiovascular exercise daily, tired, petulant and disinclined.
As intense as the Western world’s crusade against obesity has become, a certain reluctance to judge publicly the habits of the overweight persists while anorexics, a target of concern for decades, seem like fair game for tabloid trash. “Super Skinny Me” asks us to think about the purposely emaciated as self-obsessed dupes of a tabloid universe perpetuating myths discarded long ago. A modern young woman ought to know better than to want to look like Nicole Richie, the film implies. We might shake our heads in righteous disapproval of her. Is this a reflection of our pathos?
In the coming weeks, BBC America network will present more documentaries on body image. The most intriguing, “My Small Breasts and I” (to be shown on Dec. 16) looks at a trio of women emotionally stunted by what they consider their too-flat chests. In Britain, it seems, this presents a particularly acute problem. According to the film, statistics show that English women have the largest breasts in Europe. To be a 34 A in St. John’s Wood is apparently to feel like Olga Korbut on “Baywatch.”
One tries photographic therapy, which involves posing in front of a hippieish woman who takes provocative pictures of her meant to recalibrate her physical self-image. Your hope is that she’ll feel as good about herself someday as Jennifer Love Hewitt does right now. Let’s hope Jennifer Love grows into the Cougar she could become with time and an undying interest from college boys.
