They are what they don't eat

There is a tribe of women who exist on the edges of starvation despite living well above the poverty line; while rich in handbags, they are poor in diet, eating as little as a pitiable victim scrabbling for food in war- and drought-torn corners of Africa. It was the state of mind of this privileged yet skeletal few that I sought to understand in the documentary "Superskinny Me," in which I immersed myself in the culture of thinness. I joined the world of women who live on the fringes of an eating disorder in order to fit into that most coveted of red-carpet dress sizes: the mythic size zero.

I was fairly sure I couldn't get to a zero; my bones are simply too big. I'm a fit and healthy 38-year-old, 140-pound, 5-foot-8 journalist and restaurant critic. But for the project, I would try to get myself camera-ready slim, to get that look of fatless, worked-out, sinewy flesh -- a look I call "the acceptable face of eating disorders" -- by dropping down to 120 pounds.

I started with the Master Cleanse diet, drinking nothing but a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper and blasting my bowels with two pints of saltwater daily. Then I went to a "fasting and detox" center for daily enemas and colonics and exercised feebly twice a day, yet I couldn't sleep for the hunger. Then I lived on fruit, vegetables and steamed fish. To sum up, for four weeks I ate little and smoked a lot.

The psychopathology of my immersion was intense and real; the more weight I lost, the more I wanted to lose. Progressing toward a physical ideal was empowering. London girls like myself -- but you can insert Paris, New York, L.A. or anywhere fashion and media have a fierce grip -- are especially prey to dieting culture. For ambitious perfectionists, being thin is the literal embodiment of success.

Withdrawing food and imposing harsh rules around its consumption -- as many trainers, cranky nutritionists and doctors will -- does strange things to brain chemistry. A combination of hunger and pouring my entire self-worth into the figures on the scales was to the total detriment of my more intangible qualities, such as intelligence, humor and sex appeal. My editor at London's Sunday Times said that I became "weird and distant." Exhausted, I stopped socializing and went to bed like a child at 9 p.m.