Six female journalists are to starve themselves until they can fit into size 2 clothing for a Channel 4 documentary.

Super-Skinny Me: The Race to Size Zero will screen early next year according to the Herald Tribune.

“This documentary will highlight the dangers of aiming for a super-skinny look, and expose the serious health risks of extreme weight-loss methods, all of which are already in the public domain,” said a Channel 4 spokesman. “At every stage of filming there will be continuous full medical support and expert guidance at hand.” The channel said it hoped the findings would provoke the same type of debate as Morgan Spurlock’s documentary film “Super Size Me,” which showed the health effects of a month long binge on fast food.

The journalists will aim to “slim down”, as the Tribune puts it so mildly, to a US size 00, or a UK size 2. Seeing as the smallest size you can usually find in the shops is 8, or occasionally 6, that must be pretty damned skinny.

On the one hand a no-holds barred look at what happens to your body when you turn it into a skeleton with a slip of skin over the top could act as the proverbial blackened lung, putting girls and women off the non-existent look.

On the other hand, this is an incredibly dangerous experiment. And six real women are going to be crash dieting themselves into starvation. Sounds more like shock-tv than a serious effort to educate people to me.

Meanwhile, the Huffingdon Post prints some excerpts from an interview with Saturday Night Live comedian Amy Poehler:

What I’ve been doing now is getting my agents to send me scripts that are written for guys. Because sometimes when guys write for women, they freeze up. I had this friend who said he had trouble writing for women, and I said, “Here’s my advice: call the guy Larry the whole time, and at the end change it to Susan. ‘Cause there’s no difference, really.”

Grow your bush out wide, tall, and proud.

Posted by Jess McCabe on 1 October 2006, at 10:33 PM