A happy and healthy size 12, local writer Dawn Porter pledged to shrink to a Hollywood size zero for a TV documentary. But as she told Nicci Martel, her ‘perfect’ body was admired by women, not men – and came at a terrible price
Dawn Porter’s lust for life decreased in direct proportion to her body size. (0396852)
THE glamorisation of the size zero body has resulted in thousands of women and young girls risking their health trying to slim down to a super-skinny figure – and the British fashion industry is refusing to acknowledge the problem.But local writer Dawn Porter intends to blow the issue wide open in a documentary in which she starves herself to achieve the ‘ideal’ body – with shocking consequences.
Super Slim Me shows Dawn on an all-consuming mission to see what it takes to shrink from her size 12 figure to the Hollywood size zero, the equivalent of a UK six.
Surviving on a diet of 500 calories a day, she flew across the globe to hunt down the stylists, designers and agencies responsible for making skinniness the desirable goal for any dedicated follower of fashion. Although some told her the size zero craze was a myth and people were not really starving themselves to be that skinny, she soon discovered that to be painfully, or perhaps deliberately, naive.
Nothing highlighted this more than a straightforward conversation with some models, who soon revealed the extremes they were willing to go to achieve the waif look.
‘I asked them straight out, “Would you be willing to starve yourself to get ahead in this business?”,’ said the 27-year-old author of Diaries of an Internet Lover. The models didn’t hesitate.
‘Yes,’ they told her.
Before filming started, Dawn weighed a healthy 10st 7lb, her vital statistics were 34-28-36 and her body mass index, the clinical measure of obesity, was a technically perfect 22. She occasionally fluctuated to 11st, which she felt was slightly on the chubby side for her 5ft 9in frame, but despite ‘having a bit of a tummy’ she had never worried about her weight.
But for eight weeks, starting in October, a film crew recorded her every move as she existed on the minimum quantity of food that a team of supervising medical experts would allow.
She had to forego her regular healthy diet of steamed fish and vegetables for a single broccoli floret for lunch and a cube of tuna for dinner, while undergoing a gruelling fitness regime with celebrity instructor Matt Roberts.
And in order to keep the weight off, she had to give up alcohol – even during Christmas and New Year.
She lost 6lb in the first week.
But as the weight continued to melt away, something worrying happened. Dawn began to obsess about food.
She couldn’t take her mind off it and, despite the permanent hunger, was becoming secretly thrilled with the way she was looking.
Eventually she got down to a small size eight – a drop of two dress sizes. A few pounds lighter and she would have been a size six, just one away from the much-vaunted zero.
And this enormous weight loss dawned on her only when she zipped up her first pair of size eight jeans – a moment many women have fantasised about at some point, whether they admit it or not – and discovered that they were actually a bit loose.But something strange happened.
Instead of feeling triumphant, Dawn found herself crying.
She had literally been reduced to tears. On the outside she looked thin and healthy but on the inside it was a different story.
Four weeks into the diet she started to suffer from serious emotional side-effects including an onslaught of extreme depression.
‘I couldn’t even face leaving the flat, I had chronic insomnia and felt like a total social reject,’ she said.
‘The hardest time was over Christmas.
I just didn’t get involved, which is so unlike me – I’m usually a bit of a social animal.
I couldn’t be bothered. I had no energy, I just couldn’t deal with people coming up to me and commenting on my figure.’
But there was another reason why she cocooned herself in her apartment.
Dawn was terrified she might be offered food if she ventured into the real world and feared she might not have the willpower to turn it down.
She also experienced headaches, constipation and violent mood swings, erupting at her friends over ‘absolutely nothing’.
After starting out completely confident in her looks, by week seven she had become so self-conscious that she began snapping at the documentary director every time he wanted a body shot. She had never felt so unattractive or uncomfortable – the raunchy writer had lost her libido.
Medically, Dawn’s body had taken a beating and by the end of the experiment she was on the brink of causing irreparable damage to herself. She had developed a worryingly low white blood cell count and her level of nutrients was less than 25% of what it should have been.
She was warned that if she had continued, her periods would have stopped and her hair would have grown lank and thin. But more importantly, her immune system would have become so compromised that she risked infection such as TB, or even developing cancer.
Her weight reached 9st 4lb and her BMI was barely 19. Another six or seven pounds lighter would have put it at 18.5 or below, a figure considered to be underweight by the World Health Organisation.
She would also have been banned from the catwalks in Madrid and New York, whose fashion industries introduced a BMI limit of 18.5 to protect the well-being of their models following the death of 21-year-old Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, who had been living on a diet of apples and tomatoes. She died from a kidney malfunction brought on by anorexia nervosa and bulimia, weighing only 40kg and with a BMI of 13.4, which is classed below starvation level.
Despite pressure from campaigners, of which Dawn now considers herself one, the British Fashion Council has refused to follow suit and ban size zero girls.
‘It is so irresponsible. That model who recently died had an eating disorder, so she wasn’t choosing to starve herself, she was ill and would have continued to have a problem regardless. But the fashion industry encourages people to be extreme, which in no way helped her, or helps others with the same disease.
‘The fashion industry also encourages those women who do have a choice to be as thin as they can because that is desirable, fashionable, or even beautiful and those women will go to dangerous lengths to achieve it.’
Responsibility does not just fall on the fashion industry.
The British Fashion Council has refused to follow other countries’ example and ban super-skinny models. (0398000)
According to Dawn, celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and Nicole Ritchie also have a duty not to buy into the size zero image. She does not think Posh has an eating disorder but that she chooses to look the way she does – if the former Spice Girl started eating healthily, there would be no way she could retain her size zero frame.
This rings especially true if you consider the way she looked when she bounced onto the pop scene back in the mid-90s with not a scrap of fat on her and an enviable size eight figure.
‘I now know first-hand the lengths she must go to to look like she does now and the worst thing is that she puts herself out there in the public eye.
‘She has made herself a style icon. That is now part of her job and part of her “iconic” image is her size zero body. She’s even recently said that she won’t be using size zero models to model her new clothing line – how ridiculous is that and how hypocritical?’
Dawn’s career is on the rise and this new documentary is sure to put her name on the map. But everyone knows the camera adds 10lbs. Is she not scared that she might fall victim to the showbiz cull on curves?
In a word, no. The eight weeks of the experiment were the worst of her life. The one thing that stopped her from wanting to keep the new skinny image she had worked so hard to achieve was the realisation that her life was no better or more successful than it had been before. In fact, the reverse was true. As soon as the project was over she tucked into a plate of sausages and mash washed down with a glass of red wine and within three weeks of stopping the diet, her weight stabilised at 10st 3lb. Her headaches stopped and her depression and insomnia vanished.
‘I knew my body would never reach size zero but I wanted to show what had to be done to maintain that lifestyle. I reckon I could stay at nine-and-a-half stone if I really wanted to, but I now know how unpleasant that would be. The worst part of it all was the comments – people always stopping to tell me that I looked amazing when they had no idea how I was feeling inside or what I’d had to go through to get like that.’
One of the most shocking discoveries to come from Dawn’s experiment was the admiration she had from other women. Men had stopped finding her sexy, her loss of confidence had made her unattractive, but so many women rushed over to congratulate her. They found the new Dawn desirable and were envious of her skinny body.
The sad implication of this is that on some level, most women have been brainwashed by the size zero phenomenon – whether or not they strive to emulate it themselves, it is always in the back of their mind that society seemingly demands physical perfection.
And that does not mean a fit and healthy body, but what has increasingly become the culturally accepted precedent that to win you must be thin – whatever the cost.
* Dawn was born in Scotland but grew up here, attending Ladies’ College and the Grammar School and later taking up a place at Sir Paul McCartney’s prestigious Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.
After graduating, she worked as a runner on live chat show Skinner and Baddiel Unplanned, doing anything from filling the on-set fruit bowl to ironing Skinner’s shirts. She also worked for a short time on the Ruby Wax Show and appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, Balls of Steel. Last year saw the release of her debut autobiographical novel, Diaries of an Internet Lover.
Article posted on 7th February, 2007 - 12.00am
Most Commented: