Chewing the fat

THE first in this brand new series features superskinny 19-yearold Tatiana Moxley, who weighs six stone nine pounds, and supersized Sandra Andrews, 39, who weighs 23 and a half stone.

By swapping eachother's diets for five days, the programme aims to make them realise that they both have a dysfunctional relationship with food, that to eat too much is just as bad as under eating.

As well as monitoring the progress of the pair in a simulated feeding clinic, over the next eight weeks the show will also follow journalist Anna Richardson road testing extreme diets and "You Are What You Eat's"

Gillian McKeith, who has been given the brief to banish the nation's big bums.

In fact, the highlight of the programme for me was Anna getting onto the scales for the first time in seven years and discovering to her horror that she is a stone heavier than she thought.

After quizzing a model about the drastic measures catwalk queens take to keep themselves so slim, she embarks on the monotonous apple diet. I won't tell you if it works or not, but she does end the experiment seeking solace in a bag of fish and chips.

THE programme is full of numbers. Tatiana is one and a half stone underweight and eats the equivalent of the average four-year-old, while Sandra's thigh is seven inches bigger than Tatiana's waist and she consumes 3,700 calories a day, an extra six days worth of food per week.

Their progress is monitored by suave Dr Christian Jessen, who says: "It's a radical approach we really believe will help them discover a healthy attitude to food."

Day one of the drastic diet swap sees Tatiana serve Sandra up a low calorie cereal bar for breakfast while Tatiana is presented with leftover Indian takeaway. By 2am Tatiana is forcing down her sixth greasy meal of the day while Sandra looks on with envy.

While we know and generally accept that calorie controlled diets are safe, I found it uncomfortable to watch such a painfully thin girl like Tatiana binge on an endless supply of gigantic portions of fatty foods without being told about the effects this shock tactic would have on her shrunken stomach.

There is nothing new about seeing fat people in their underwear on television, but it is still shocking to see a pretty girl with no shape to her jutting bones and dark rings around her eyes. Dr Jessen tells her that she is at risk of getting wrinkles, the lines on her palms showed she could be prone to anaemia, she was at risk of developing bone disease due to her lack of calcium and her panda eyes are symptoms of chronic fatigue, all of which can be cured if she eats a more healthy diet.

While there is no suggestion that Tatiana has ever suffered from an eating disorder, the fact that both she and Sandra have such extremely different diets means they both have serious emotional issues with food.

Tatiana admits that she hates it when people touch her and put their fingers around her wrists, telling her to put on weight, while Sandra says that when she eats something warm she feels like she's getting a big hug, before disclosing that she lost a baby son three years ago and, as a result, did not want to go on living.

Although the programme is full of catchy phrases like "Sandra will try to add fat to Tat" it shies away from addressing the obvious big issue of why both women eat the way they do.

If the women had been more closely matched in age and personality they may have opened up to each other more, but with apparently nothing in common, their conversations are stilted and reveal little. I think a third party was needed to help both women confront their food hang-ups and then we might all have actually learnt something.

In an age where young girls are bombarded with images of the American size zero and childhood obesity threatens to become the norm, the programme could have been an ideal way to chew the fat, but instead it just left me hungry for more.